Read how many words per minute

It has been argued by some that the process of pushing for greater reading speed lowers comprehension. This is both true and untrue, and the threshold for reading with good comprehension is different for different people, and changes with the amount of reading practice. For example, your average Kindergarten graduate should be able to read at around ten words per minute. Students from homes where books are read, including being read aloud to the student, are likely to have a larger speaking vocabulary.

They also have arrived at school knowing that information and stories are contained in books and are likely to be excited about learning to read the words for themselves. By the middle of the year in first grade , a student should read around 23 words per minute.

In second grade this should have increased to 72 wpm, by grade three to 92 wpm, grade four wpm, and by grade five. Speed increases continue steadily through middle school, and by grade 8, they should be reading around words per minute.

For most students, speed increases will continue more slowly through high school as youngsters pursue other interests, but they should continue to progress steadily toward the average adult reading rate of , or better. Enjoyable practice has a great deal of influence on reading speed and comprehension. Sometimes the difference between a reader and a non-reader is simply finding material that is appealing to the student. Make no mistake about it, reading is a skill that requires practice.

It is a visual, kinetic and cognitive skill, which means that different people are likely to practice reading at varying skill levels. Reading for at least fifteen minutes a day has the potential to increase reading skills. If the reading material is enjoyable to the reader, those fifteen minutes will breeze by, instead of being a laborious chore, and might even stretch into an hour or more of pleasurable activity.

Each reader will have different levels of reading, as well. A good reader, who has a cruising speed of words per minute, can quickly read through fiction or magazine articles that are of interest.

However, dense textbook material that is heavy with new vocabulary and facts is likely to slow any reader from his or her top reading speed. So, what constitutes reading speed? For a new reader, who is puzzling out words one at a time, it could be one or two words a minute, and then a burst of reading speed as he or she puts the words together in a sentence. People who are not habitual readers might struggle along below their normal speaking pace, especially if they are vocalizing the words while they read.

Readers who cruise along in the reading speed do not necessarily read every word in each paragraph. They have learned to read in chunks, and often form pictures in their minds as they read, so a novel or even an interesting bit of non-fiction will unfold as if it were a video. In fact, reading speed is affected by the medium which is being read. Slightly different skills are needed to read a rolling television script, a computer screen, an electronic tablet, the screen of a cell phone, a printed book or even a newspaper.

The medium is held differently or perhaps not held at all , the words display differently, and the information is formatted differently. Some speed reading programs display text one word at a time, challenging the reader to immediately recognize the word and associate it with the previous words to develop comprehension. With all these things in mind, we can come back and say that many literate adults read at an average reading pace of around to words per minute. Most of us are capable of learning to read comfortably at a much faster pace, it just takes a little training to push beyond a familiar comfort zone to take advantage of that ability to think at a rate of words per minute or more.

Reading at a faster pace with comprehension and recall might require daily practice. This often means pushing to a higher reading rate, just to develop speed, but then dropping back to a lower rate to acquire information or to enjoy a story. In addition, even though vocalization or sub-vocalization can be a good learning tool, as can using a pointer or tracing words with a finger, these helpers must be left behind before higher speeds can be realized. Motivation for developing a greater reading speed can also be a factor.

It can be for pleasure — to be able to read the best-selling books before they get turned into movies, or it can be for profit — because being able to absorb large amounts of material quickly is helpful in school and on the job. We live in an age of communication and information.

We stand at the edge of an ocean of knowledge, with a small cup — our ability to read. No matter how well you read, you will only be able to take in a portion of that ocean. But the better your reading skills, the larger your cup becomes, and the more information you can gather in a short amount of time.

Information is power, and reading is the quickest, most efficient way to gather information. Paul is the founder of Iris Reading, the largest provider of speed-reading and memory courses. I am 14 and can read anywhere from wpm — wpm depending on the context of the book.

It has been thought that the average adult reads at a rate of words per minute. He found that the average adult reading rate has been overestimated. Silent reading adults average words per minute and adults that read aloud average words per minute.

This is done most effectively through consistent practice in short intervals over days. It might be hard to teach an old dog a new trick, but it is possible to improve your average reading speed, even as an adult. The most effective way to improve your average reading speed is to do reading fluency training.

Fluency training speeds up your ability to both decode and retrieve information from memory, RAN Rapid Automatized Naming. A second piece of improving fluency is to strengthen your eye movements eye training. In order to read with skill, your eyes need to move smoothly across the page from left to right visual tracking. Rayner, in , summarized 25 years of research on eye movements.

Reading involves eye movements. These eye movements are called saccades. This is when the eyes are moving rapidly. Rapid eye movements and eye-tracking are separated by fixations when the eyes are relatively still.

Saccade movements typically travel about 6 to 9 letter spaces. They are not impacted by the size of the print. The complete perceptual span is larger, extending to 14 or 15 letter spaces to the right and 3 to 4 spaces to the left.

It is the saccade movement to the left combined with the perceptual span length that assures that every letter of every word enters the visual field.

Understanding this visual span perception span combination leads us to realize that efficient readers do this easily. And as the text becomes more difficult, saccade length tends to decrease and regression frequency increases. If you skip words, repeat words, or have trouble sounding out words, this throws fluency and meaning of the selection off. However, these skills can improve with fluency training. Speed reading per se, the thought of reading at speeds of above words per minute—much higher than the words per minute achieved by the average college-level reader sounds like it would be amazing.

Once the timer rings, count the words you managed to read. This number is your words per minute speech speed - you can input it directly into our calculator after opening the advanced mode.

The same principle goes for your reading speed - the number of words per minute of reading. The average reading speed for the English language is between and wpm , depending on the text difficulty and your natural aptitude.

Naturally, you can measure your reading speed and input it directly into this words per minute of reading calculator. All you have to do is set the timer to one minute again and start reading a book or an e-book , this time silently. Once the timer rings, count the words you read and input the number into the respective field in the advanced mode. Once you know your speaking and reading speed, the calculations are a piece of cake!

All you have to do it input the number of words in your speech into this words per minute calculator, and it will tell you how much time your presentation takes. Of course, you can also use this calculator to figure out the maximum number of words in a speech with a limited time frame - for example, 5 minutes. Let's look at the calculations in more detail.

Choose whether you will be speaking to an audience or silently reading the text. In this case, we are going to choose speech. Embed Share via. Table of contents: Words per minute speech Words per minute reading How many words is a 5 minute speech? Words per minute speech In order to determine how long your presentation takes, you first need to figure out your speaking speed - how many words per minute of speech you can deliver.