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Unaccelerated Reading

Written on: June 20th, 2010 in Blog Posts, Learning, Reading

“Slow Reading” has been in the news recently. Thomas Newkirk, Professor of English at New Hampshire University, was featured in wire stories such as this one about how slowing down the pace of reading improves children’s comprehension and mastery. You can read the original article by Newkirk through the libraries’ subscription databases at this link (with your library card number and PIN, but his conclusion seems attractive:

Not all our reading, nor all our students’ reading, can or should have this depth. We read for various purposes. But some of our reading should have such depth, inefficient as that might be.
There is real pleasure in slowing down. We can gain some pleasures and meanings no other way. The term taste applies to both literacy and eating. And to taste, we have to slow down. Schools need to take a stand for an alternative to an increasingly hectic digital environment where so many of us read and write in abbreviated messages.

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