IELTS Reading Tips and Guidance

IELTS Reading Tips and Guidance

These IELTS reading tips and guidance will come handy for your preparation and real test.

Read the instructions thoroughly and understand the requirement

Many students lost valuable number just for not giving attention to the instructions properly. This is especially true in the reading and listening assessments because they give very specific instructions. If you don’t follow these instructions exactly, you will get answer wrong.

For example, the instructions might express ‘write two words and a number’. This could mean: 

One word

One particular word and quite a few

Two words

Two words and a number

Try not to panic

A few of the questions will be simple some will be extremely difficult to figure out the answer. The key is not to panic when you are trying to answer a horrible one. Practically all of the IELTS teachers I know have to check on the answers to some questions because they are so difficult.

The wrong action to take is spend a sizable period of time on a question and is not able to spend enough time on other questions. If the answer would not present itself, move on to another. You can always come back to the difficult questions later and answering the other questions will most likely help you.

IELTS reading tips

Prepare for unknown words and phrase 

Many of individuals have been taught to look up every term in a dictionary they don’t understand in a dictionary. The theory in back of this is good, a wide vocabulary is essential to getting a good score in the IELTS test, but worrying about all the words an individual understand in the reading exam is one of the worst things you can do.

Understand what understand a word in the reading test there are two things you can do. You can look at the text and sentences around it for clues as to it is meaning or you can go forward and forget about it. A person understands the meaning of every term. Even native speakers- and many IELTS teachers- may not be able to understand all what in the reading test.

 

Practice your reading skills NOT your IELTS skills

It is important to familiarize yourself with the IELTS reading test, IELTS reading as well as gain an understanding of the different questions. It is also important to learn from your mistakes (see below). Even so, students who just practice IELTS exams are absent out on a good possibility to improve their basic reading skills.

IELTS reading texts can be a little boring and you are very likely to read regularly if you read about something you are interested in. Browsing for pleasure a little every day will not only improve your British skills, but also transform your life vocabulary. There are hundreds of blogs, newspapers, journals and newspapers to choose from online. Practice makes perfect.

 

 Timing is essential

 

If you spend too much time using one question you will leave less time for the other questions, however, if you try to do the test too rapidly you will neglect information and may get confused. I advise my students in an attempt to get each section finished in 20 minutes. This breaks down to 16-17 minutes to read and answer the questions and 3-4 minutes transferring and checking your answers.

IELTS reading tips

Some teachers suggest students to spend a set or fixed amount of time to each question but this is bad advice for one main reason- some questions are definitely more difficult than others and definitely will, therefore, take you more hours. What you should do is pay attention to your timing when rehearsing. You will observe which questions take you longer and which questions take you less time. This will likely give you the self confidence to spend a bit much longer on certain questions and stop panicking in the exam.

Ignore anything you know about the topic.

 

Practice slow and fast

Many teachers advise students to practice for the IELTS reading test ‘under exam conditions’. Therefore you do the practice test in one hour without the help, just like in the exam. This can be low-quality advice for a few reasons.

By doing the test under exam conditions you put too much pressure on yourself therefore you don’t give yourself the perfect time to reflect how to answer specific question types, area patterns in questions and how you answer them, note down common terminology and notice how enough time you spend giving an answer to certain questions.

 

Be careful when transferring your answers

In the test, you’ll be asked to transfer your answers to an answer sheet. A common blunder is to shell out too much time on reading and answering questions and giving very little time to transfer the answers. This is merely natural that foolish mistakes are manufactured when people are under pressure.

 

Keep no blanks

 

This might seem to be one of the clearest IELTS reading tips but you would be surprised how many people leave blanks. Even if you don’t know the response, be sure to look at every question. There are no penalties for wrong answers, so have a guess. You might get lucky in addition to nothing to lose.

 

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