TEN TIPS FOR READING
Everyone knows the IELTS reading exam is tough. You a very short amount of time to
answer a large number of questions on very complicated texts. You need to develop very
good reading skills to get a 6.5. Band Score or higher and have a range of strategies
prepared in order to tackle it. Here are some tips:
Read Academic Texts
Read in your free time! The IELTS texts are “general academic texts”. This means they are taken
from sources such as textbooks and specialist magazines and journals. If you are not familiar with
reading these kinds of texts in English it is essential that you start reading them in your free time so
that you are used to the types of language and structure used when you meet them in the exam.
Three typical sources for IELTS texts are (in order of difficulty
–
easiest first) the National
Geographic, the New Scientist and the Economist. You can get these magazines in most newsagents.
Focus
Focus on the text first, the questions second! A good understanding of the text helps you answer the
questions more efficiently and effectively.
Categorise
IELTS exam writers select a range of specific types of texts. Learning to recognise
the type of text
you are reading can help you predict its structure and therefore understand it more quickly. There
are four types of IELTS texts a) analytic texts, which discuss the reasons why something happened
or make recommendations or explain a concept b) descriptive texts, which describe a situation,
explain how something is done or categorise something c) discursive texts, in which different
opinions are expressed about an issue and d) narrative texts, which explain a chronological
sequence of events.
Skim
Develop your ability to skim. Skimming is reading quickly by skipping over unimportant words like
prepositions
and ignoring difficult words that you don’t need to understand. Do this to get a general
idea about a text or a paragraph or to intensively search for the answer to a question.
Scan
Learn to scan. Scanning is what you do when you look for a price in an advertising text or a name in
a telephone book. When you scan you do not actually need to read
the text but move your eyes
quickly over it. You can scan from left to right or right to left, from top to bottom or bottom to top.
Do this to find the location of answers in the texts looking out for easy to spot words like numbers,
dates and words beginning with capital letters such as place names.
Structure
Learn to recognise paragraph structure. This often involves spotting the relationship between the
main ideas and supporting ideas in a paragraph. Paragraphs are
most frequently descending, i.e.
they begin with the main idea somewhere near the start and develop from there, although some,
frequently the first and last paragraphs of a text, are
ascending
–
the main idea is located towards
the end. This can be particularly helpful when matching headings to paragraphs.
Overview
Get an overview of a text before dealing with the questions. Do this by reading the title and subtitle
as well as focusing on the beginnings and ends (but not JUST the first and last sentences) of
paragraphs. This helps you process the information in a text (and thereby answer the questions)
more quickly.