[Cushman]

That's what I'm saying, you already do that. When you read a line of text your eyes move several words at a time, but your area of focus is only wide enough to really see a few letters at a time. You are recognizing some words wholesale, simply ignoring others and filling in with context.

The impression that you have seen the entire line of text is a clever illusion developed inside your brain. You very rarely pay attention to individual letters as graphemes symbolizing individual phonemes; you simply can't think that fast (and in fact, you probably do not have a very good conscious idea of which letters symbolize which sounds in reality).

Not to say that dotsies aren't neat, and they could have some benfit to reading speed, but really all they are is thinner. Reading is already a pretty amazing superpower that you have.

Now if you're serious about wanting your kids to read better than you, check out what I wrote about a phonetic alphabet above. That would be a serious improvement.

[jacobolus]

Yeah, and speaking for myself, actually parsing the words is never the slowest part of comprehending a piece of text. Much slower is figuring out what a whole thought is saying, figuring out how it fits into the fabric of the text, figuring out whether it’s right, what it says about the author’s agenda, what news ideas it provokes, etc.

There’s certainly some marginal advantage to come from improving word parsing speed, but just like any speed reading technique, that advantage goes only so far, I would guess. (For instance, if I’m only trying to recognize words & nominally parse the grammar, I can move my eyes much faster and cover text extremely quickly, but when I’m doing that, I’ll typically realize at the end of a paragraph or page that I don’t fully understand what’s being said because I haven’t taken the time to think through all the implications.)

[dedward]

If you want your kids to read faster than you get them on speed reading training - just takes constant training.

Teach them sign language, while young when it's really easy to learn (harder for us adults, though apparently not hard either) - it could open up a lot of doors, and if I'm not mistaken it's somewhat internationalized? If enough of the new generation groks that, imagine what it does for communication.

Teaching them a new alphabet nobody uses won't help anything, other than theri own shorthand - but that can be improved even better by teachin ghtem real shorthand.

Also consider having them learn a second language - Mandarin probably. Throw in a romance language and they'll have no trouble learning new languages in a snap throughout life.... they'll naturally see patterns and grab concepts adults who grow up with a single language/alphabet don't.

[arnsholt]

Actually, sign languages are quite distinct. Distinct to the extent that British and American sign language are not mutually comprehensible (ASL is in fact related to French sign language). In Norway (where I'm from), some of the sign language dialects vary a lot more than the spoken dialects as well.