So Many Words, So Little Time

Evelyn Wood is dead. But her life’s work lives on in 9-year-old David Tabarez.

David can zip through the children’s classic “Chocolate Fever”--all 93 pages--in less than 20 minutes. That’s one page every 12 seconds for a book that usually takes third graders a few days to finish.

“I can learn more things in speed reading than I can in casual reading,” David said.

The inquisitive El Centro student is a walking advertisement for the speed reading industry, which promises to turn virtually anyone into a supersonic reader--often in a matter of hours.

With names like “Power Reading” and “Mega Speed Reading,” motivational companies pledge to double or even triple the reading speeds of their clients while boosting comprehension--claims that some experts say are overblown.

Their products--seminars, videotapes and more--are accompanied by money-back guarantees. They tout the information age virtues of speed and productivity in colorful ads on the Internet or in educational trade magazines.

“One home schooling mother got her 11-year-old daughter to speed read comfortably at 12,000 words per minute with good understanding,” boasts the Web site for Speed Reading 4 Kids, the program used in David’s classroom. That’s 50 times faster than the average reader.

The best known of the enterprises, Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, aims its one-day seminars at harried business professionals.

Wood, a once-obscure teacher from Utah, became a household name in the 1960s and ‘70s as U.S. presidents, senators, celebrities, corporate executives and others lined up for the speed reading course she created to help solve student behavior problems.

John F. Kennedy invited Wood to teach his White House staff in 1962. A few years later, Richard Nixon invited her to do the same with his staff. And in 1977, Jimmy Carter and his family took her course.

More than 2 million people have passed through the program since Wood launched her empire in 1959, according to past estimates. Wood died in 1995, but her program continues to sell through a Kansas-based motivational company.

“Even if you consider yourself a hopelessly ‘slow reader,’ the time-tested Evelyn Wood method will work for you,” its Web site proclaims. “Results or Else! That’s our guarantee.”

Researchers say such programs can dramatically increase reading speeds, but they challenge the assertion that understanding increases.

“Speed reading definitely does not increase comprehension,” said Marcel Just, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Just conducted a study of the Evelyn Wood program, comparing a group of its graduates with others who had not been trained to speed read. He found that the normal readers took longer to finish their material but demonstrated better comprehension.

Works Best on Simple Material

Conventional readers tend to look at each word on the page. In some cases they sound out words silently in their heads or with their lips. Such readers get through about 175 to 250 words per minute, depending on the complexity of the material.

Speed readers are taught to widen their visual field so they can absorb groups of words, or entire pages, enabling them to move faster. They often use their hands to guide them down the page.

But experts say that such readers are really skimming or sampling words and drawing inferences based on what they have read--a process that works well with familiar or relatively simple material but can prove less effective with dense texts.

“Speed readers are getting an overview, which is not bad if you want [that],” said Ronald P. Carver, an education professor at the University of Missouri who has written extensively on the subject. “But you have to perceive every word to understand the thought the author meant to communicate.”

Those arguments are merely academic to Patricia Reese, who has enthusiastically introduced a speed-reading program to her third graders at Sunflower Elementary School in El Centro, just north of the Mexican border in Imperial County. She found the program over the Internet.

Reese sees speed reading as a way to give her students a leg up in a world crammed with information.

“The people who are going to do well are the people who can read quickly,” said Reese.

Reese says she has seen phenomenal results since she began using Speed Reading 4 Kids.

Reese conducted speed reading drills an hour a day for two weeks in late February and early March. She also told her students to spend about 15 minutes a night speed reading at home. She says that about half of her students have seen their reading speed and comprehension levels rise; the students take quizzes after reading each book to determine how much they understood.

“I’m very excited about what they are doing,” said Reese, whose school picked up the $39.99 bill for the program.

David Tabarez is one of Reese’s success stories.

His average reading speed has jumped from 237 words per minute to 700 since February, Reese said.

But even David acknowledges the limits of his newfound skill.

“It’s also good to slow down when you speed read because you might understand more,” he said.

Speed Reading 4 Kids is used mostly by parents and teachers in Washington state, the home of its author, George Stancliffe, a substitute teacher and former geologist. “You can teach speed reading, even if you can’t speed read yourself,” he said.

Stancliffe’s program and the others have taken their inspiration from the Evelyn Wood program, which is now owned by Pryor Resources, a Kansas company that offers more than 100 seminars for business professionals on everything from customer service to management skills for secretaries.

The Evelyn Wood seminar generally costs $139 to $169 per person, but prices vary according to a group’s size, a trainer said.

“The average person is going to double their reading rate and increase their comprehension about 10%,” said Amy Bass Morrisey, a seminar leader supervisor.

“It will help get you through the piles of stuff you need to read,” she added.

Terri Garcia would not go that far in describing the results of the program. She took the seminar with about 35 co-workers from the city of Los Angeles’ retirement system last October.

Garcia said her reading speed increased significantly for about two weeks, but the gains vanished shortly after because she didn’t practice the techniques. “You really have to keep at it,” she said.

The city picked up the $3,800 bill for the training, which was meant to increase efficiency of the retirement system staff, said Garcia, who supervises the payroll input unit.

Garcia said the course did help improve her comprehension and her note-taking skills.

“It helped me in my day-to-day functions,” she said. “I actually take really great notes now.”