The Effects of a Speed Reading Warm-up Activity in an EFL Writing Class

A 10 minute speed reading activity was given to students at the beginning of their writing class for 10 weeks to see what effect it would have on developing their reading fluency. Previous studies have had success increasing students’ reading fluency without hurting their reading comprehension in as little as 15 minutes for 13 weeks in classes with other foci (Chang, 2010), and this study sought to see if students could achieve similar reading speed increases while having more time to spend on the primary writing focus of the course. Over the 10 week period in this study, students not only increased their reading speed by an average of 31 words per minute (33%) but also increased their comprehension by an average of 2.9 (47%).