Strategies for Helping Readers
Adjusting the Rate of Reading
Selecting an initial rate based on purpose, perceived difficulty, and degree of familiarity with the content. Rate is adjusted while reading as purposes change, or a new assessment of difficulty and familiarity is made.
Watch a Video About This Strategy
Video Link
Suzanne Clewell
"Facile readers need to read in different speeds, different paces for different purposes, and it's very important that students have that flexibility to be able to read for a variety of purposes and to either quicken their pace, to find an answer to a question or to be able to read really thoughtfully and methodically in order to follow a procedure."
("By introducing the idea and also by modeling. So when students have good models of people reading for different purposes at different paces they can use that as a guide for their own reading."
When Can It Be Used?
During reading.
What You Can Do to Support This Strategy:
Choose materials that support this strategy. Select texts that are both easy and difficult to model and provide practice of the need to vary the rate. (To determine the difficulty of a text, use this online tool. It predicts the level of reading difficulty for any text you enter. This tool is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences with the support of National Science Foundation funding.
Find out more about adjusting the rate of reading.
Use this handout to help students recognize how to adjust their reading speed for different tasks.
Find Out More
Part of the Reading Rockets site. It provides an explanation of rates of reading plus tips for teachers who want to help students adjust their reading rates.
TurboRead, a speed reading company, offers online reading checks to test your speed of reading and your recall of facts.
Next Strategy: Predicting ideas and events