Tips to Increase Your English Reading Speed and Comprehension

A student asked me last month if I could just teach her to “read faster.” Not read better, not understand more — faster, like it was a setting she could turn up. So I gave her a short article and a stopwatch. She blazed through it in half her usual time, grinning the whole way. Then I asked her three questions about what she’d just read, and she got zero of them right. She hadn’t read faster. She’d looked at more words per minute and understood none of them, which is a completely different skill, and not a useful one.

That’s the whole problem with most reading-speed advice floating around online, so let’s deal with it properly. I dug into the actual research on this rather than just repeating what speed-reading courses claim, and some of it surprised me. Here’s what’s actually backed by evidence, and what to do about it.

The Speed-Reading Myth I Used to Believe Too

I used to assume speed-reading courses were basically legitimate, just intense. Then I read the big 2016 review on the subject by Keith Rayner and colleagues, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest — about as serious a source as psychology has — and it’s blunt about this. Skilled adult readers of English average somewhere around 200 to 400 words per minute with normal comprehension. A large-scale review by Marc Brysbaert in 2019 puts the more precise figure at roughly 238 words per minute for nonfiction and 260 for fiction, for average adult native readers, silently, for themselves. Courses promising you’ll double or triple that — jumping to 500, 700, 1000+ wpm — while keeping full, detailed comprehension are not supported by the evidence. What actually happens is that people get faster at skimming, which is a real and useful skill, but it’s answering a different question than “did I understand this text.” You can skim a menu. You can’t skim a contract, or a novel, and expect to get the same thing out of it.

So if the promise of effortlessly doubling your speed is off the table, what’s left? Quite a lot, actually, because the research points to some genuinely useful things you can do — they just require patience instead of a trick.

Tip 1: Read Things You Almost Already Understand

Here’s a number worth knowing: researchers measure how much of a text’s vocabulary you already recognize and call it “lexical coverage.” Batia Laufer’s research, refined with Geke Ravenhorst-Kalovski in 2010, suggests you need to know roughly 95% of the words in a text as a bare minimum for workable comprehension, and closer to 98% for comfortable, independent reading. That’s the difference between meeting one unknown word every 20 words versus one every 50. A later study by Norbert Schmitt, Xiangying Jiang, and William Grabe backs this up with actual comprehension scores: readers averaged around 60% comprehension at 95% coverage, climbing to about 68% at 98%.

The practical upshot: if you’re reaching for a dictionary every second sentence, the text is too hard for building speed right now, no matter how badly you want to “level up” by fighting through advanced material. Speed comes from fluent recognition, and you can’t build fluency on a text where a third of the words are new to you. Drop down a level for a while. It isn’t giving up — it’s exactly how this works.

Tip 2: Read a Lot, and Let Some of It Just Be Fun

Stephen Krashen has argued for decades that free voluntary reading — picking up something because you want to, not because it’s assigned — does more for a learner’s English than most structured drilling. Richard Day and Julian Bamford turned that into a set of classroom principles known as extensive reading: lots of easy, enjoyable, self-selected material, read for pleasure or general understanding rather than picked apart line by line.

This isn’t just a nice theory. A 2016 meta-analysis by Jayoung Jeon and Richard Day pooled the results across multiple studies and found a real, positive effect on reading ability from extensive reading programs. A newer 2025 meta-analysis covering 73 studies found a smaller but still significant effect, and specifically noted that the benefit was stronger when learners had some accountability and chose texts at a level that actually suited them — not too hard, not busywork. And in a year-long study of 97 Japanese university students by David Beglar, Alan Hunt, and Yuki Kite, the students who spent their time on pleasure reading improved their reading speed more than students doing intensive, dissect-every-sentence reading — without losing ground on comprehension. More miles on the page, not more magnifying glass on the page, is what moved the number.

Tip 3: Stop Fighting Your Inner Voice

Nearly every speed-reading course tells you to eliminate “subvocalization” — that quiet inner voice sounding out words as you read — because it supposedly slows you down like a bad habit left over from childhood. That Rayner review I mentioned earlier looked at this directly, and the evidence runs the other way. Experiments that force readers to suppress that inner speech, or fill it with irrelevant chatter, tend to hurt comprehension, especially on harder material and on questions that require actually reasoning about the text rather than just recognizing words. Silent inner speech isn’t a leftover flaw. For a lot of skilled reading, it’s doing real work.

So if you’ve been feeling guilty about “hearing” the words in your head while you read English, stop. You’re not doing it wrong. Save your energy for the tips that actually move the needle.

Tip 4: Read About Things You Already Know Something About

Patricia Carrell’s classic 1987 study found that familiarity with a text’s subject helped ESL readers’ comprehension more than familiarity with how the text was structured. Your brain isn’t just decoding words; it’s using what you already know to predict what’s coming next and fill in gaps, and that prediction is a huge part of what makes reading feel fast.

A 2017 study by Ana Chang and Jonathon Millett put real numbers on this with Taiwanese EFL students: when learners read a passage on a topic they’d already been introduced to, they read it 16 to 18 words per minute faster than an unrelated passage, and their comprehension scores were higher too — in one comparison, about 77% versus 71%. If you’re choosing between two articles at your level and one happens to be about something you already know a bit about, pick that one. You’re not cheating the system. You’re using exactly the advantage skilled readers use without thinking about it.

Tip 5: Learn When to Skim and When to Slow Down

Eye-tracking research going back to Keith Rayner’s landmark 1998 review shows that your eyes don’t glide smoothly across a page. They jump, in quick hops called saccades, spanning roughly 7 to 9 letters at a time, then pause for 200 to 250 milliseconds — that pause is a fixation, and it’s when your brain actually absorbs the word. Somewhere around 10 to 15% of the time, your eyes jump backward to re-check something, and that’s called a regression. A 2015 study on bilingual reading found that reading in a second language typically means more fixations, longer fixations, and shorter forward jumps than reading in your first language — which lines up with exactly how reading English feels early on, like wading rather than gliding.

Here’s the detail I found genuinely reassuring: that same study found no real difference in how often people regress — jump back — between their first and second language. A regression isn’t a symptom of bad reading. It’s your brain noticing it missed something and going back to fix it, and skilled readers do it too. The goal isn’t zero regressions. It’s knowing when a regression is worth it, versus when you’re skimming for a fact and don’t need to catch every detail. Reading a bus schedule and reading a court document are not the same task, and treating them the same is where a lot of “speed reading” advice goes wrong.

The Honest Target

A 1999 study on Japanese students, cited in Brysbaert’s review, found something I think is the real takeaway of this whole article: students who answered more than 75% of comprehension questions correctly averaged 139 words per minute, while students who fell below that comprehension bar averaged only 61 words per minute. The faster readers weren’t faster because they were skimming harder. They were faster because they understood more, and understanding more is exactly what lets you stop backtracking, stop re-reading the same sentence, and move through a page at a normal pace.

Speed and comprehension aren’t a trade-off you have to manage. They rise together, as a side effect of getting genuinely better at English — more vocabulary, more reading mileage, more background knowledge, less anxiety about your own reading process. There’s no shortcut that skips that work, but there’s also nothing exotic required. Read a lot, read things slightly below your frustration level, and stop treating your comprehension score as separate from your speed score. They’re the same score.

If you want to see where you actually stand, right now, on both numbers at once, I’d rather you check than guess. Our free Reading Speed Test times you on a real passage at your level and grades your comprehension in the same run, so you get one honest picture instead of a speed number you can’t trust. There are three different passages per level now, so it’s worth retaking every so often to see the two numbers move together over time, instead of memorizing one passage and calling that progress.

Keep reading

• Why Flashcards Alone Are a Waste of Your Time
• The English Plateau Nobody Warns You About (And How to Break Through It)