Aptis reading Test: General Tips and Strategies

Know your weaknesses:
Unless you know your weaknesses, you won’t know how to 
improve. The biggest weakness for many is that they try to read a text in English in a different way 
than they would in their language. They feel that they have to read the English text very carefully 
and slowly. 

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Do not rely on translation.
You are more likely to remember a word if you learn it in 
context and with English having so many words that mean different things, you are not so likely to 
get the wrong meaning. 
Keep a vocabulary notebook
but not only with translations but with words that collocate, 
or go together and with opposites or antonyms (this will make it easier to remember the word, and 
you double your vocabulary at the same time). 
Remember to revise
the things you have learned regularly. So that something stays in your 
memory, you have to review it, or you will forget. Long periods of study are not suitable for 
remembering English, but regular periods are. Three 20 minute revision periods are better than one 
one-hour session. 
The joy of reading:
it is important that you enjoy your reading experience. Reading for 
pleasure not only makes you want to read more, it also improves your reading skills. 
Re-telling the story:
It is a good idea to paraphrase what you have read. You can do this by 
writing down the main ideas of a chapter in a story, or an article you have found interesting. 
Summarising what you have read, using your own words, helps to build your vocabulary, which is 
very important for your APTIS test. 
Notice the title of the passage.
It often gives you a general idea about the main idea of the 
text, as will the sub-headings. 
Guess the meaning from the context: 
When a native speaker in any language finds a word 
they don’t understand, they rarely translate. Usually, they get a general idea from the contest. Firstly, 
you can ask yourself, do I need to understand this word to answer the question? the answer is usually 
no, in which case you can ignore it. If the answer is yes, then decide if the word is positive or 
negative? Finally, look at the context. 
Example: 
He was put in prison for robbery but later exonerated.
The word ‘exonerated’ is quite a specialised word in English and not used much and we don’t 
know if it is positive or negative. We know someone was put in prison and then we have the word 
‘but’ this tells us there was a change to the situation. We can guess that ‘exonerated’ means 
something like freed or cleared, which it does.