A study was carried out to measure the speed of silent and loud reading in children aged 7 to 16 (grades II to XI). Age-relevant texts were presented statically and in the form of a moving line. The speed of reading was found to increase with age, in silent reading the subjects applied more flexible reading strategies than in reading aloud. Only the youngest schoolchildren read static texts more slowly than moving ones, while advanced readers displayed the opposite tendency. Findings on reading speeds, correlated with types of phonological mistakes made by the readers, allow the author to put forward a few hypotheses on mechanisms of improving reading skills.