There are many tricks out there to improve reading skills, but none of them will work for some of the most serious reading problems. If your son or daughter has a learning disability, all of the hooked on phonics in the world will not save them. What they will need is a good, professional tutor who knows all about reading, and parents who are willing to take the time to give them the extra help they need. Improving reading skills is something that you can only do if you have reading skills to begin with. It will not work for the severely disabled.
Nonetheless, for those of us who are good readers, there are a lot of strategies that work to improve reading skills. I have always had this problem with the speed of my reading. I pride myself on being a very thorough reader, but my speed often suffers for this. I am so immersed in the book that I take too much time watching every event unfold. This is fine for when I am reading for fun, but when doing coursework, it becomes a big obstacle. When I was in college, I soon realized that if I could not improve reading skills, I would have no free time whatsoever. I would be stuck inside all the time, finishing my books!
Purely by accident, I came across an ingenious program that helped me improve reading skills. I cannot remember what it was called, but I'm sure you can find one online. What it would do was to cycle through a text. It would show you a certain number of words at once, but would keep moving on very quickly. The word at the far left would disappear, and a new word would appear at the right. You could set the speed or set it up to slowly increase until you couldn't keep up with the text anymore. It helped me improve reading skills tremendously. With my improved speed reading skills, I was one of the fastest readers out there.
Of course, many readers have just the opposite problem. They can read very fast, but it is not much use to them. When they are done reading, they have no idea what they have just read. It is harder to improve reading skills in comprehension, but it can be done. The key is to interact with the text as much as possible. Whenever you finish a chapter or section, you should ask yourself what just happened, what character development there was, and what will happen next in the book. This will help improve reading skills by making you interact with the book and think about what is going on.
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