New technique aims to improve reading skills and understanding

The importance of reading is increasingly regressing, especially among the younger generation, much to the consternation of parents.

But a revolutionary new system launched in the UAE promises to not only reverse this trend, but even roll it back further to actually raise reading skills well above the average.

The technique was developed by industrial psychologist Dr Stanley Rodgers, an Australian, to increase the speed of reading and understanding the text by more than 300 per cent.

Dr Rodgers, a war veteran and a millionaire, who flew planes for the Royal Australian Air Force at the age of 16, developed the programme after becoming involved in the training of military recruits.

After leaving the air force, he aimed the system at improving reading skills among business people but now it has been extended to schools and colleges.

Executive Skills, a company based at Knowledge Village in Dubai, has been given the licence to run the programme in the GCC.

Musa Sadoon, the director, said the system, known as Advanced Reading Skills, differed greatly from speed reading.

He said: "Speed reading means fast reading which does not necessarily concentrate on comprehension. Our focus of the advanced reading skills, is creating a balance between speed and comprehension."

Participants of the two-day workshop are instructed to complete a series of eye focusing exercises and take tests to calculate their Effective Reading Rate (ERR). The director added: "Research carried out in native English speaking countries shows that the average words per minute (WPM) is 220, and the average comprehension is 55 per cent. Multiply the two figures and it gives the ERR, which equals 121.

Sadoon feels that teaching good reading skills in schools has been greatly neglected in recent times.

Symptoms of bad reading skills are shown when a person can only read aloud, pauses between syllables, reads over sentences more than once and cannot concentrate.

He added: "With poor reading skills, the concentration is placed more on the word than the meaning of the sentence. While reading, the brain and the eye work in tandem. If you are absorbing 250 WPM it means that you are only using 25 per cent of your brain."