There is a very important fact about eye movement that you need to know. If you record the eye movements of someone who is reading, you will notice that, from time to time, the reader goes back and looks again at something he has read before; in other words, he regresses to an earlier part of the text, probably because he realises he does not understand the passage properly. Then he comes back to where he left off and continues reading. At one time, it was thought that regression was a fault, but it is in fact a very necessary activity in efficient reading. There are several different kinds of faults in reading, which are usually exaggerated with foreign learners. The most common one is that most people read slowly than they should. There is no rate at which people ought to read, of course: it depends on your purpose in reading; how difficult the language is, how unfamiliar the material is and so on. But most people read everything at the same slow speed, and do not s...
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