The goal is of course, 100% accuracy at tempo. I think for most people, unless you are in situations where you have to do a lot of sight reading (like accompanying), then being able to play as accurate as possible at tempo is key. Sightreading slowly is good to start with, but as you work on the skill, you really want to be able to play it at tempo on first sight.

Thanks for your reply, Morodiene.

Will you let sight-reading hold back the progress of your students? For example, if a grade 4 student cannot fluently read grade 2-3 pieces, but otherwise ready for learning grade 5 pieces, will you continue assigning grade 4 pieces to him/her and wait until he/she can fluently read grade 3-4 pieces before you assign any grade 5 pieces?

The goal is of course, 100% accuracy at tempo.

I think many adult beginners focus a lot on sight reading as if that were the key to playing piano well. The only thing that is key is playing lots of music over a period of years. Move forward if you are ready, and continue to work on your sight reading starting at wherever you are currently able to play with a decent amount of accuracy and as close to tempo as possible.

<<I've heard many people saying piano students should be able to sightread at a difficulty level 1-2 grade lower than their performance pieces.>>

Yes. This is formally stated in some examination board schemas and implied in others (where sight-reading tests are analagous to test pieces two grades below).

<<But it's not clear at all what degree of sight-reading skills is acceptable at that difficulty level - Sight-reading at >90% accuracy and right tempo makes it a lot harder than playing at 70% accuracy and tempo...>>

Sight-reading should be 'fluent' but perhaps a little slower than full tempo. If you are "decoding" or "decyphering" whilst sight-reading you are not practicing sight-reading. Some errors such as stopping, restarting losing the rhythm are considered worse than merely hittiing the odd wrong note (and indicative that the material is too hard). I've also seen comparissons drawn with learning a foreign language, where to improve in reading it, you have to be reading at a level you can do at 95% accuracy (apparently).

<<Also, when you practice sightreading, do you play a lot of pieces which you can read at close to perfection? Or do you play pieces that you can play at 70% accuracy/tempo and try to improve the accuracy and tempo?>>

Short answer:

Sight-read a lot of pieces at your "fluency-level".

A somewhat longer answer:

A sight-reading schema worth looking into is that described by Dr Dianne Hardy the "Diagnostic Prescriptive Sight-Reading Program" (DPRSP). If you google this you can find her articles describing it in detail. This involves concurrently working on pieces at three levels.

1. Level 1: This is your sight-reading fluency level. The level you can read and play fluently without stops, restarts, hesitations etc. You can go slightly slower than full tempo and it should be challenging. Daily you sight read 2-pages at this level prima vista. If your fluency level is way below your level for "challenging" pieces then you can double up this task.

2. Level 2: Study and polish a piece one level above the fluency level for 1-week only then move on.

3. Level 3: Study a piece two levels above the fluency level for several weeks then move on.

Test to determine your fluency level. Test yourself with graded materials (sight reading tests or pieces), within the schema your using every 3-4 months. You then
re-jig the 3 levels of pieces based on the achieved fluency level. i.e. if you find that you can sight-read grade 3 fluently, then this becomes the new Level1 and L2 = G4 and L3 = G5 and so on.

This appears to be a hollistic approach, not just integrating sight-reading with studying pieces, but rooting and relating the level of pieces studied to your sight-reading fluency level.

My DIY approach to this is to largely use ABRSM material or related graded materials (both pieces and sight-reading tests). Apparently when well into the scheme you can slot in a "challenging" piece at "Level 4" (3-levels above the fluency reading level). I get the impression that many are working on pieces significantly higher than this (I was). One thing I have tried to do is to avoid memorisation for the level 2 & 3 pieces.

Pros:

1. Sight-reading improves!

2. Score reading improves. I split the 10 minute Level1 study slot so that I study the score for 5 minutes or more away from the piano then sit down and play through. I notice after a couple of months that I'm getting better at "hearing" the piece during the read through.

3. You play a large range of repertoire and find all sorts of patterns and rhythms that your fingers may not be familiar with.

4. You soon find yourself developing better keyboard orientation skills and keeping your eyes on the score and not looking down at the keys.

5. Develops "professionalism". Play the pieces as well as you can even though they may not be to your personal taste.

6. You learn pieces you study quicker.


Cons:

1. "Phase1". The level 1, 2 & 3 approach sounds fine, but there's also Levels -3, -2 & -1 to contend with. i.e. You find that your sight-reading fluency skills are below those of the level-1 pieces. You have to be honest. I found I couldn't read the ABRMS Grade1 pieces fluently enough at prima vista. So I started by working through 3 sight-reading method book series in parallel. Ten method books and 3-months later I'd improved to the point where I could read the G1 pieces and so kicked off the full schema a month or so ago.

2. Time. My study task plan was to originally do 10 minutes for each of the levels. I soon found out that this is OK for level 1, but that level2 requires a minimum of 20 minutes and on day1 of the week its worth doing several slots. Similarly for Level3. Then if you add in studies, scales, arps, sight-reading methods and so forth you soon start clocking up several hours which I struggle to achieve, so I tend to prioritise L1> L2> Technique> L3. Repertoire maintenance has gone by the board (again).

3. Sourcing L1 material. You need to source a lot of material at your fluency Level. I'm taking out oodles of graded books (vol1 or book1) and collections of pieces from the public library. One problem is that the material is often too hard to be played fluently. I had thought that it may be due to patterns or styles that I'm not familiar with until I noticed that a piece from the "Book1" of a series I'm currently working through is listed as an ABRSM Grade 4 in the current syllabus. So I tend to alternate collections with ABRSM exam pieces from the current and previous years (theses only have 9 pieces and at two pages a day it's less than a week's L1 material).

4. "stepping-stone" pieces. Be prepared to play a lot of pieces that you may not even like, but you will discover some gems along the way.

it should be good. learning music is like learning another language and only playing by ear and not being a good reader of sheet music is like knowing how to speak english but not reading or writing it. no offense to anyone, just my two cents.

i can barely read a book, let alone a piece of sheet music on sight lol.

I cannot read either and pretty much have all the poor reading habits listed on this website and have carried them all over to my piano sight-reading... //sigh
1) Reading note by note
2) Sub-vocalization
3) Inefficient eye motion
4) Regression
5) Poor Concentration
6) Approaching reading linearly - Well, not entirely. I read measure by measure and group notes in treble clef and bass clef separately, but I think what needs to happen if I ever want to sighreading fast to mix the treble and bass into one big note group? Then I won't need to waste anytime trying to figure out how to put the treble group notes together with the bass group notes. Some teacher teaches a zigzag reading sequence that jumps up and down between the clefs, which really makes it even more messy for me.

I've made some improvements on (1)(4)(6). (3) and (5) feel more or less like physical demands which I naturally do better when I am not tired.

But (2) is the most difficult and controversial one to get rid of. That is probably the reason why reading grand staff is so difficult for me b/c a person cannot sub-vocal two voices in human mind. On the other hand, I feel that subconscious sub-vocalization of the melody actually helps me play some cantabile pieces really well. So I'm not sure I want to get rid of that completely either... I guess I need some sort of switch to turn the sub-vocalization on/off easily.

Actually, I'd love to see someone start out at say age 45 and then in 5 years be incredible. It would be a full time job with lots of overtime and weekends worth of work at the very least!

yeah i reckon it just takes honestly like years and years of time and practice and eventually it becomes second nature, just like how we read and write english. think about how long it took us to learn that as children.

but nonetheless, music is somewhat more challenging than just learning another language.

yeah i reckon it just takes honestly like years and years of time and practice and eventually it becomes second nature, just like how we read and write english. think about how long it took us to learn that as children. but nonetheless, music is somewhat more challenging than just learning another language. like let's say someone is learning to speak spanish. before they can speak it fluently and fast, they have to start out very slow. learning to speak the language of music is a little bit more difficult because it's almost like trying to do 3 things or more at once, very overwhelming.

The difference between the child and the 45 years old is that the child has more time to practice and focus on piano, less worries distracting him/her, less limiting beliefs holding him/her down and a less competitive attitude (doesn't measure him/herself up against other skills)

But the thing about the sponge-brain and the first three years have been pretty much debanked. What really matters in that department is that the child is always mentally stimulated, is going to school and learning new things while most adults just let their brains rot.

Music is a lot more challenging and one will never read music like he/she reads a book. In a book you're going to find the same exact words belonging to the language the book is written in. There are many but they're limited and 80% of all the words in an article or book are the kind you're going to use everyday. But with music, no matter if you get used to some patterns that you'll find in other similar pieces, there will always be a lot of new stuff, lot of new patterns to decipher or notes so fast your eyes can't possible see them all at once. In fact even the best book reader, would do slowly and make mistake if he was reading a book full of new medical terms. Well, music is like that.