Background knowledge about certain subjects has a powerful influence and helps on your reading speed. If you already know a lot about the topic of the material, you may glance at it and discard it as a waste of time. Alternatively, you may race through the reading, mentally predicting what comes next. You do not reread anything because you feel confident that you understand it. No vaguely recognized words can slow you down.
On the other hand, if you do not know much about the subject, you must read slowly in an attempt to absorb the new ideas and eventually lock them down together with the old information you already know. Occasionally, vocabulary becomes the greater problem. You may have to reach for the dictionary for clarification. You may reread a sentence or a paragraph to figure out what the author is suggesting.
A problem for people who use English as a second language is that they have the knowledge, but they don't have the equivalent English word translation for what they know. Children who have not been read to before entering school are at a disadvantage when they enter first grade and try to learn to read. They know English, but they don't know "book talk." Written English is different from spoken English. Similarly, people who grew up speaking a different dialect or a different language often must slow down as they read to adjust to the sentence structure of standard written English. Here, frequent reading of popular or of professional materials, though boring and uninteresting, strengthens your comprehension of standard written sentence structure.
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