IELTS preparation tips that helped Bahar get Band 8.5 (Reading)

These IELTS Reading tips were shared by Bahar, who received the Overall Band score of 8.5 (with Band 9

in Reading!). You can read her advice for the Speaking test here.

“How to begin
Before turning to the questions, take a brief look at the text to gain a general idea of what it is about. Then,

read the questions clear and more than once to be able to answer more efficiently. After having an idea of what the text and especially each paragraph is mainly about, it is wise to determine which questions belong to which paragraphs. This method did a great deal of help, in my experience. You can also write a short title for each paragraph to make the classification of the questions you need to answer easier. It takes less time to search for a particular point when you know what each paragraph contains.

Dealing with difficult questions
When facing a difficult or confusing question, the best thing to do is to leave it and turn to other sections and fill out the other blanks in your answer sheet. When you are done with the easy questions, you can go back to the difficult ones and this time, you have more time to concentrate on them and are, therefore, more relaxed and able to think clearly, without worrying about other questions as you have already done them.

Tip for TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN
Do not in any way confuse a NO with a NOT GIVEN or a FALSE with a NOT GIVEN upon reaching YES, NO, NOT GIVEN or TRUE, FALSE, NOT GIVEN questions. When a phrase is FALSE, make sure to find its exact opposite in the text. If you cannot, or if such a phrase is not mentioned, then it is NG. As for YES or TRUE phrases, you must be able to locate them as they are often clearly stated in the text, paraphrased and with words of similar meaning.

Write answers in the right places
It is quite essential to check whether you have written the answers in their right places. For instance, if you write the answer of question 12 beside question 13, then both are marked as false and just like that, you lose two points, even if both answers are correct. So check the questions and the answers every now and then. One way to be certain of this is to say “question 12…C”, for example, clearly in your head for every question you answer to avoid the answers getting mixed up.

Guessing can help
As you receive no negative points when you a question wrongly, make sure to fill all the blanks even if you think your answers are incorrect. There is still a slight probability of them being right.

Don’t re-think your answers
Do not dwell too much on your already-answered questions. Chances are that you would not only correct your answers but choose wrong ones.”

For many academic IELTS candidates reading is the hardest paper and the one which requires most training. Here I suggest some different ways to make that training as efficient as possible. These pieces of advice are fairly general and are designed to help you think about the best way to train yourself in IELTS reading and how to avoid some common mistakes.

1. Beat the fear – read as much as possible

My first suggestion is to read as much as possible. By this I don’t mean do endless IELTS practice tests, I mean do as much general reading as possible. I suggest you focus on reading short articles on topics that interest you or on topics that are common in IELTS – newspapers and magazines are a great resource here.
One reason why this is such a good idea is that many candidates freeze in the reading believing it is too hard and so fail to get their band score. If, however, you read enough “native English” before the exam, you will become more and more confident in looking at texts where you don’t understand every word. Confidence is a very important concept in IELTS.
If you look at Daily Exercises, you will find lots of possible exercises for you. The idea is to find something that interests you and read. That’s all.

2. Improve key skills – skimming and scanning and reading in detail

A major problem in the exam is the length of the texts and you will not have time to read them all carefully. You need to train your speed reading skills so that you can read as efficiently as possible. 2 skills here are skimming which is reading quickly for general meaning and scanning which is looking for specific information.
You may sometimes see advice saying that you don’t need to read in detail. Incorrect. Bad advice. You shouldn’t read the whole text in detail but you will need to parts of the text in detail – if you want to get the right answer. Put simply, skimming and scanning are useful skills to help show you where the answer might be: reading in detail tells you what the answer is.
You might want to look at this post on improving your reading speed.

3. Time management – experiment to see what works

Because the texts are so long you need to have a definite strategy for how you manage your time in the exam to make sure you finish on time. This means deciding:

how long you look at the text before answering questions
how long you spend on each question
how long you spend on each group of questions
how long you spend on each text
do you leave time at the end to go back at look at unanswered questions?

There is a lot to consider here. You will find books and websites that insist you do it their way. They may claim to have a magic formula and that you must do this or you must do that. Ignore them. Their advice may be good for some people but not for you.
The key point here is that different learners have different styles and different needs. Much the best advice here is to experiment and try different approaches and see what works best for you.
See this earlier post on time management.

4. Focus on the question – avoid careless errors

The texts in IELTS are typically quite hard, so candidates spend as much time as possible reading the texts. Mistake. Why? Well, a huge amount of mistakes are made by not focussing enough on the exact question. It can be easy if you are in a hurry to miss a word such as “always” or “often”: the problem is those sorts of words can change the meaning of questions.
There is an easy solution to this problem: it is to go back and look at the question before you write in the answer. Make sure that the question says what you think it says. You will normally save yourself 2/3 marks this way.

5. Learn the exam – know the different types of questions

There are 8/9 different types of reading question that examiners may use. Before the exam, you should make yourself familiar with each type of question as they are slightly different. What I suggest is that you look at my series of tutorials on the different types of reading questions as a first step to see what the question types are. The next stage is to experiment and see what techniques you are going to use for each type of question.
This may mean that you approach different types of questions differently.

6. Train yourself, don’t test yourself

One common mistake candidates make is to practise exam questions too much. Exam practice is important to learn the timing (3 above) and learn the question types (5 above), but that does not mean that every time you practise reading you need to do it in exam conditions. My suggestion is that you do some “open book” tests where you can see the answers as you do the questions. This way you will learn how examiners set questions and how to find the answers. If you just test yourself, this may not happen. How often and when you do this training will depend on your preparation programme.

7. Learn how to underline

This is a very specific piece of advice. You may believe it is wrong to write in books and generally I’d agree with you, but IELTS is different. A very strong suggestion is that you should underline words in the text in the exam. There are at least two reasons for this:

if you underline key words in the text, it can help you organise the text and this will save you time in the exam
if you find an answer, it is sensible to underline the part of the passage that relates to the question as a check (see 4 above) and to write the number of the question next to it in case you find a better answer later

How you do this will depend on you and your style. Some people underline different types of words in different ways.I’d only add that less is more: if you underline too much, it can become confusing.

8. Beware word matching – be careful with key words

One very common mistake is to match a word in the question with a word in the text and to think you have found your answer. It is almost never that simple and I am tempted to say that if the words do match, then that is not your answer. What you are normally looking for are either synonyms (words with a similar meaning) or paraphrases (short bits of text that say the same as the question.
One reason candidates make this mistake is that teachers (myself included) tend to say look for key words in the question. This is helpful advice to show you where the answer might be and which paragraph it might be in. After that you need to go back and read the whole question carefully to see what the answer is.

9. The questions follow the text – normally

This is a very practical piece of advice and could save you a lot of wasted time. Typically, the questions will come in the order of the text: so the answer to question 3 will come after the answer to question 2. This can be very helpful in the exam if you are a quick worker who goes through the questions once for the easy ones and then a second time for the harder ones. If you have answer 4 underlined (see 7 above) and answer 6 underlined then you know where answer 5 must come.
One word of warning. In certain types of question (eg paragraph matching) the order of the questions are jumbled.

10. The questions or the text – which do you read first

There is no one right answer here.
Text books tend to advise you to read the text quickly first so that you know how the text is organised. This helps as you will save time later by knowing which paragraph will contain the answer. This can be a good approach, particularly for high level candidates provided you don’t spend too much reading and you have notes/underlinings afterwards.
Many teachers say that you should read the questions first and not read the whole passage. There is logic here too. Normally, you do not have to understand the meaning of the whole passage to answer the questions, so why waste time reading it? This approach can work, especially for lower level candidates who might not understand too much of the passage anyway.
However, thee is always a third way. Life is not black and white. It is quite possible to decide to use different strategies for certain question types. In paragraph matching you are going to have to read the whole passage, so you might decide to read first then. In the short answer questions, you might decide you look at the questions first. As ever, you decide.
The only bad piece of advice is the one that tells you you must do it their way. Ignore them. The only right way isa the way that works.

11. Fill out the answer sheet

Okay, this is an eleventh tip. Practise filling out the answer sheet before you get to the exam. Too many avoidable mistakes are made this way. I’d go further: whenever you practise IELTS reading, use an answer sheet. This is what I do with my classes. Two points:

when you go through the answers in your practice book, make sure that you have written the answer exactly as it is in the book – anything else will lose you the point
you need to fill out your answers in the 60 minutes. They don’t give you any more time.

You can down load practice answer sheets from my downloads page.

বাঁশেরকেল্লা - Basherkella

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Saturday, June 8, 2013