It surprises me that my kid reads novels faster than me, one reason I can see is that they benefit from their spoken English, their native habits of linking, sound reducing and phrasing in oral English contributes a lot to their reading speed.
I have my own experience to support this point. We have a brain chatter continuously uttering sounds in the brain when we do some reading, even during our thinking. With our traditional habbits, we tend to pronounce every English word clearly when we read, and we don't know linking/reducing/skiming/skiping as we were not taught those techniques, we were not taught intonation and phrasing when we learned English as a second language at home, as a result of which we tend to pronounce every word clearly when we read novels, hence the speed is naturally slow. This is the case of me.
Recently I found that I've improved in my reading speed, one important factor is due to my attention to the practise of language prosedy aspects of English with regards to Sounds Reduction in "prepositions like 'to', 'for', 'at' 'of' etc; conjuction reduction like 'and' 'or' 'as'; pronoun reduction as 'you', 'your', 'he','her'etc; auxiliary verbs reduction such as 'am', 'was', 'can', 'would' etc.. Liasison is alo an important aspect of English language music, skill points such as 'vowel vowel connection', 'consonant vowel connection', 'consonant consonant connection', 'T, D, S, or Z + Y connection' etc.
Almost all the intonation language points are covered in Ann Cook's "American Accent Training", and I know that many people in this forum have picked up that book. For those who are new, here's my another recommendation of this book, you will benefit from it.
In a word, besides the practise of English sound "segmentals", ie, English phonetics, one should start picking up English prosedy, the "suprasegmentals" of the language, the music of the language: the rhythm, intonation, syllable stress, word stress, thought groups, reduction and connected speech.
The importance of prosedy and suprasegmentals in listening and spoken English.
