In our previous post, we recommended for you to practice reading English as much as possible in order to improve your English speaking and reading abilities (See our post about Why Reading is so important in improving your English speaking). In fact, reading English aloud is one of the best ways to rapidly advance your ability to understand English.
In this perspective, do you also wonder how fast your progress is in understanding English? The best way to do this is to see how much you can understand while English native speakers read something at different speeds. This is not always practical though.
Many English experts recommend to measure the speed of understanding by gauging your reading speed. If your reading speed is getting fast enough, then your understanding process, which works in the same way as with reading, is naturally improving. In other words, the speed of understanding English by listening is proportional to understanding English by reading fast.
Let’s try to measure your reading speed. Read one or two pages of one of your English books and measure the time it takes you to finish one or two pages. Count every word including articles (like “a” and “the”), numbers and people’s names. If you read 500 words in 10 minutes, then your reading speed is 50 words per minute or wpm. wpm is a standard term which is widely accepted as a reading speed index.
If someone reads without understanding, it can be meaningless. So people sometimes use another measurement tool, ‘ewpm’, or efficient words per minute. To measure this, a person needs to answer several questions about what he read. In the above case, if he answered 80% correctly to the questions, then his ewpm is 50wpm * 80% = 40 ewpm.
How fast do you need to understand English? You need 150 wpm to understand English news and documentaries and 200 wpm for English movies, though there are some exceptions to those rules depending on specific situations. The average speed of American people is usually around 200 wpm. Some people having high educational background can read at 400 wpm while very few people, less than 1% of the US population can read at 1,000 wpm.
