Home
>>
Sci-Edu
Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, July 29, 2002
Increasing Chinese Craze for Fast Reading
"Inhale-exhale-slowly, slowly. Bring the air down to your pubic region." It's time for fast reading class, Wang Xuexian style.
PRINT
DISCUSSION
CHINESE
SEND TO FRIEND
"Inhale-exhale-slowly, slowly. Bring the air down to your pubic region." It's time for fast reading class, Wang Xuexian style.
Accompanied with lively, soft music and the tick of a metronome, more than 300 students in a neat, spacious auditorium are shuffling their books like west winds.
Chen Han, a second grader at the Xicheng (West Urban District) Foreign Languages School in
Beijing
, said, "I could read only 280 characters a minute in the past, and now I can take in as many as 6,000."
Wang founded China's first fast-reading school in 1993, after years of meticulous investigation into oriental and Western theories. He said an average student of his can upgrade his reading speed 10 times from 300 words to more than 3,000 characters a minute after attending a down-to-earth training course of 30 class hours in five days.
More and more Chinese are apt to take fast reading classes. students come across China from the border city of Heihe at its northernmost tip in northeastern
Heilongjiang
province, straight down to the southernmost
Hainan
Island's Sanya city, which is dubbed as country's "remotest corners", Their ages range from eight to 74 years.
"This is no miracle," Wang said, "The key is to move your eyeballs swiftly, shuffle your books and concentrate on eight to 10 characters at a time. My fast reading enables you to remember at least 60 percent of the content."
However, relevant statistics from the China Reading Association(CRA) available show that the vast majority of Chinese school children at primary and high schools cannot read at a speed of 2,000 characters per minute. And quite a number of fifth-graders could merely read 600 per minute.
In the information explosion age of today, Wang said, there is a danger a nation that reads slowly