welcome back today i'm talking about reading in english because
if you want to go to school or work in english you need to be able to read well
this video is the first in a series of videos about tips for reading better and today's video
is all about reading speed how fast do you read in english today i'm going to talk about two things
first why should you care how fast or slowly you read in english and second how to calculate your
reading speed in other words how many words per minute do you read in english so first why is
it important to know your reading speed who cares how fast or slowly you read in english
your reading speed is important because your time is important to you your reading speed
will help you plan your time and also you will know how to improve your reading speed
if you read slowly in english you should know this because you will need more time to do your work
most of my students read at about half the speed of native english speaking students
so that means that they need double the time to do the reading but often when they finish the
reading they realize that they didn't understand everything and then they have to go back and
read it again so as you can see your reading speed affects your daily life let me show you
an example in a psychology class the professor assigns for example 25 pages of reading per week
the average english speaking student maybe needs two hours to do that reading but english learners
who read at half the speed will need four hours to do that reading but then when they finish
maybe they didn't understand everything and they have to go back and read it again so now we're
looking at eight hours of reading time versus the two hours for the native english speaking students
so as you can see your reading speed can affect your daily life
so the first step to improve your reading speed is to know what it is you can't solve
a problem if you don't know what you're working with first you want to know what your reading
speed is now and then you want to check it every two weeks or so to see if it improves
so to calculate your reading speed you're going to follow these easy steps step one choose an article
to read you want to choose something that's not too difficult and not too easy the purpose of
this is to calculate your reading speed not to have fun or to read something super hard
probably the best thing to do is to choose an article from the internet because you're gonna
need to find out the number of words in the article try to look for a website that doesn't
have too many ads and when you find an article that's just right for you copy and paste the text
into a document if you paste it into microsoft word you can look at the bottom left corner to see
the number of words if you paste it into a google doc you're going to open tools and then word count
to see the number of words now that you've chosen something to read and you know the number of words
it's time to start reading open your phone and open the stop watch and when you are ready to read
click start on the stopwatch when you finish click stop on the stopwatch and you will see the time
it's a good idea to write it down just in case you forget it step three you're going to convert your
time to a decimal the reason for that is that you're gonna need to take your reading time and
use it in a calculation and you need to convert it to a regular number instead of minutes and seconds
so first you're gonna round the seconds to the nearest 5. if your reading speed is 5 minutes 23
seconds you're going to round it up to 5 minutes 25 seconds if your reading speed is 5 minutes 21
seconds round it down to 5 minutes 20 seconds next you're gonna convert those seconds to a decimal
using this chart these numbers are available in the description box below the video so if you
want to copy and paste them into a document to keep you can for example if your reading speed
is 5 minutes 20 seconds according to this chart 20 seconds is 0.33 so now your reading time is 5.8
next you're going to take the number of words and you're going to divide that by your reading speed
for example if the article has 627 words and your reading time is 5.33
then your words per minute is 117.6 that means that you read about 118 words per minute in
english step five keep track of your reading speed make a chart and write down the date and your
words per minute and try to track this every week or two weeks if you practice reading every day
or every other day then you will start to see improvement try to check your reading speed
every two weeks and write it down in your chart and try to see if your
speed improves if your speed doesn't improve try to practice more be sure to check out my
other tips for reading faster and if you liked this video please give it a like and subscribe
this will help my videos to reach more english learners like you thank you and see you soon