At which tempo do you practice sight-reading?

[rovis77]

Hi, When practicing sight-reading should I practice at the tempo of the piece or slower?.

[indianajo]

When you are a professional able to do anything on request, you practice at tempo.
When you are below that skill level, as I am, you practice at the speed where you are likely to make no mistakes.
I go typically 80 bpm with no accidentals or 16th notes.  If there are those challenges, I play about 50 bpm.  If no mistakes, I speed up second pass through. 
I played four hymns by request Sunday, one I'd never heard of.  Neither had the requester, he was thinking of some other hymn with a similar first lyric.  I played that one, too. 

[chopinlover01]

As always, the answer is one of the thousands of shades of grey.

If you're reading a late Beethoven work (though obviously that's not sight reading practice, but you'll have to do it to acquaint yourself with the work), you'll be doing it slow and methodically.

For actual sight reading practice, you should read slow enough to get all the important stuff (notes and rhythms), but fast enough to actually push your sight reading ability. If I'm reading a Bach two-part invention (great sight reading material, by the way), I'm going about quarter=80 most times.

[klavieronin]

I second chopinlover01's advice. Practice slightly faster than you feel comfortable with but not so much that you can't keep up.

[lostinidlewonder]

Hi, When practicing sight-reading should I practice at the tempo of the piece or slower?.

The key word you have used here is "PRACTICING" sight reading. Not reading a piece with the aim to master it.

Practicing sight reading can be done in many ways, you can play at tempo (or even faster than tempo) or much slower, you can neglect rhythms or include them, remove or add whatever necessary. To improve accuracy of sight reading generally we practice with much slower tempo and to improve our speed of sight reading we practice faster tempos. It is generally important to practice with pieces that are at our level rather than working with things much too easy or difficult, although if you take many easy pieces you tend to be able to improve speed reading more readily and if you take much more difficult pieces you can slow down the tempo to improve your accuracy level (you can test this accuracy phenomenon by playing very dense looking works slowly and then going back to works you are more ready for, you generally will find it much easier to read, sort of like swinging a weighted baseball bat before taking the bat you will play with). What is important is that you use good fingering, when sight reading it is very easy to use inferior fingers and just carry on as if it is meaningless, good sight reading training aims to improve your fingering understanding "on the go" but often we have to stop and study what is the best fingering (especially if you are developing reading skills) so the flow of our reading certainly can take pauses for this.

[mike_lang]

I think I'm in alignment with the replies above, but absolutely much slower. If you can read the piece  accurately in tempo, you don't need to practice sight reading that sort of piece. Find a piece that requires you to slow down to three-quarters tempo, and practice reading it at HALF tempo. Forces your eyes to move ahead. Enforce this with a metronome - to keep you from speeding up when it gets temporarily easier.

There's also a lovely exercise by S. Bernstein in which you verbally articulate details a measure or two ahead of where you are playing. That's helpful, too.

I'll also say that to some degree, your sight reading a function of how many patterns you've seen. For this reason, it's equally valuable to learn a fair measure of repertoire over time (and learn it well!).

Third factor is technique . . . obviously, sight reading will be ineffective if you can read it all but can't turn it into pianistic gesture.