When I was learning to ride a motorcycle, the most important thing my teachers taught me was, while turning, not to look in front of me, but look at where I was going, i.e. the end of the curve in the road. We had to drive around a square lot, and at each corner, we had to learn to turn our heads away from where we were headed at an uncomfortable angle, then proceed into the turn. After a few weeks of practice, my turning became less wobbly and nerve-racking.
As I practice reading here in my room, I find the same excercise is important. If I hover over ever word as I read, I am not doing much more than spitting out a series of sounds. It's not smooth at all, and I understand very little of what I read.
However, when I am moving my eyes past the characters as I read them, they form into the proper word (no spaces in Japanese, so sometimes it's a little hard for me to see where the last word ended~), and even though I still mispronounce certain hiragana, overall I can hear myself getting more and more fluid.
It's a simple concept really, reading English I am always reading the words from my mind, not the page.
Look where you are going, not where you are.