ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the reasons for having speed reading course. It examines a range of ways in which reading speed can be increased and maintained. There are many misconceptions about reading faster, particularly about how fast people can read, and these can be cleared up by looking at the physical nature of reading. There are several useful activities for working on oral reading and they have just as much value in the second language class as in the first. The learners are told that they should try to speed up each reading so that each listener hears about the same amount of text even though the time is less. Reading aloud is a useful activity to practise accurate decoding and it is a useful activity in its own right—people gain pleasure from listening to stories and talks and from reading stories to others.
