Daily Departures: Speed Reading Passages for English Language Learners

PREFACE Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank the PDXOpen publishing initiative for its support, Karen Bjork for her editorial assistance, Laura Shier and Kate Carney for their invaluable feed- back, Paul Nation and Sonia Millett for permission to use the principles and instruc- tions from Asian and Pacific Speed Readings for ESL Learners , and Scribe Inc. for the cover design. Introduction Daily Departures: Speed Reading Passages for English Language Learners is a collec- tion of twenty 200-225 word reading passages written primarily within the 1,000-word level of the New General Service List and designed to provide fluency support for English language learners at the Waystage level of the Common European Framework Reference (Browne, Culligan, and Phillips 2013; CEFR n.d.). Daily Departures is modeled after Asian and Pacific Speed Readings for ESL Learners , by E. Quinn, I. S. P. Nation, and S. Millet (2007). The following principles and instructions from that book can also be applied to this one: 1. The focus is speed. While reading without understanding would be pointless, the goal of speed reading is not to achieve perfect accuracy in answering the questions. The goal is the fastest time with ~70 percent accuracy. A good reading speed to aim for is 300 words per minute. 2. The method of reading is important. Students should process meaning in chunks. Fast reading encourages guessing from context and ignoring unknown words. Preface v