The Influence of Rapid Reading Practice on the Perception of Reading Strategies : Which Strategies are Most Affected or Least Affected?

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the effect of rapid reading practice and its influence on Japanese EFL learners' perception of reading strategies. Seventy seven first-year high school students, whose text coverage was 99.3%, participated in the fast reading practice. One of the findings was that we confirmed the similar result as the previous studies, which means the average reading speed improved from 125wpm to 191.3wpm. We also found that self-confidence in the use of top-down strategies significantly improved after three-months of rapid reading practice. It was observed, however, that the repair strategies did not change. There might be a possibility that rapid reading practice in 1000 word-level texts, in which the density of unknown words is about one in 140 words, might not affect the use of repair strategies. It might be concluded that adding repair strategies to rapid reading training will increase effectiveness.