📖 What is Chunking?
Reading More Efficiently
Part of becoming a better reader includes reading more efficiently. One way to improve your reading right away is with a technique called "chunking." Chunking means grouping letters, words, and even sentences into larger chunks (or groups) in order to read faster and understand more.
Consider someone who reads like this:
You
waste
time
when
you
read
word
by
word.
👁️ 0 eye movements (Click words to simulate reading)
In this example, a poor reader uses nine eye movements to read just one sentence. Reading word by word wastes time and makes it harder to understand the main idea. Imagine a person speaking one...word...at...a...time. He or she would be difficult to understand.
🎯 Chunking Practice
Chunking means to read words in groups or "chunks," rather than word by word.
As we saw in the introduction, too many eye movements create problems such as tired eyes and a lack of reading comprehension. Strong readers of English group words together based on their grammatical function.
Try to chunk the following sentence into word groups:
Our biggest problem is the dirty water from the river flooding the clean basement.
Below are some suggestions:
Our biggest problem is
Group a
possessive adjective together with the noun(s) it modifies; group the subject and verb.
the dirty water
Group the article, adjective(s), and noun(s) which make up the
phrase.
from the river
Group prepositional phrases.
flooding the clean basement
Group noun, verb, and adjective phrases.
Therefore, we may chunk the above sentence like this:
Our biggest problem
is the dirty water
from the river
flooding the clean basement.
Advanced readers may chunk even larger grammatical units, such as whole clauses or even sentences. Your ability to chunk more and read faster will come with additional practice.