what's the key to improving your IELTS reading score well it lies in identifying
your weaknesses and addressing them let me show you how it's Asiya let's get started
first of all we need reliable practice tests that have the same level of difficulty as the
real IELTS test basically you need official Cambridge practice tests in a recent book
let's say from 14 and up will do right now I want you to do a full reading practice
test without timer take as much time as you need why no timer well because the time pressure adds
quite a lot of complexity to the test and it's useful to know how many questions you can answer
without this external pressure write down your answers on a sheet of paper and check them how
many questions could you answer correctly that's the table that shows the equivalent band scores
in IELTS General training texts are easier so you need to answer more questions to get the same
score for example for band 7 you need 30 answers in academic and 34 in general training for band 8
35 and 38 respectively the first step to improving your performance is understanding your mistakes
check each incorrect answer one by one go back to the test find the correct answer and try
to understand why this answer is correct and not yours there may be a few reasons one of them is as
simple as overthinking yes you do need to analyze the text and carefully check that the meaning in
the question is the same as in the passage however virtually all correct answers are paraphrased
and paraphrasing never produces a hundred percent match the meaning should be close enough don't dig
deeper and deeper once you've found the answer go for it you may notice that you find certain types
of tasks particularly challenging for example true false not given yes no not given questions
are among the toughest and finding not given answer may be particularly tricky because well
it's not given remember that questions of this type come in order read the first statement start
reading the passage until you find the answer then read the second statement and so on for not
given questions you should still locate the part discussing the same topic as in the statement if
you find it but your answer is not there and then the topic changes then the answer is not given
if you can't find anything at all you've probably missed the relevant part of the text basically
if you find certain types of questions difficult learning relevant strategies can help you improve
find out how these questions are built how to look for answers I have videos about all the
toughest types of questions if you've learned a certain technique but it's not helping try
another Technique we all were different and what works for a lot of people may not work for you
keep an open mind if you struggle with certain types of questions find more questions of this
type and practice you may notice that you spend a lot of time looking for information
in this case it may help to learn which questions come in order and which don't most IELTS reading
questions come in order which means that you can read the question start reading the passage until
you find the answer read the next question and so on just as I described previously
but for example matching heading questions don't come in order but you can still read one paragraph
match it to the statement to The Heading read the next paragraph and so on in this case you know
exactly what you're looking for at any moment of time otherwise the links of passages may be simply
overwhelming I'll link a more detailed video about questions that come in order and the don't below
another technique that can help you locate your answers is highlighting keywords highlight the
most important words in your questions they will help you concentrate on what you're looking for
highlight names dates and locations in the passage in case you need them later if you can't find
several answers straight away this is okay usually I finish three passages with two three questions
announced because I either didn't find answers straight away or I couldn't understand what the
answer was just leave them and finish all the questions and then come back to those at the end
if you still have time left another reason why you may not be able to answer a certain question is if
you simply don't know the words which determine the answer this may happen and this is a direct
reflection of your English skills IELTS reading actually requires the widest vocabulary of all
IELTS sections but sometimes the most complex words don't really matter try to analyze the
sentence structure think about what kind of answer you're looking for and then try to understand how
different parts of the sentence are related for example your question may be about whether
a new scientific theory was accepted by other researchers and you may read a sentence like his
research into something you don't understand was immediately put under question by his colleagues
is our statement true or false well it's false to put under question means not to accept
and if you don't really understand what the research was about it doesn't matter another
sign that you are lacking vocabulary is if you make more mistakes in section three this is the
hardest part of the test and if the size of vocabulary is the problem the solution lies
in learning more words in this case doing more and more practice tests won't bring the results
because the strategy is not your problem you need to concentrate on learning new words once
you've analyzed your performance without time pressure do another test in timed conditions
and write down how much time you spend only in each section so what happened to your performance
it's normal if you answer fewer questions with the time limit in place the question is how many
if your performance deteriorated a lot this is something to work on there are two main areas to
address the first is your time management how much time did you spend on the first section second
third remember that in each test the first section is the easiest and the third is the hardest
if you spend 20 minutes on the first you're compromising your performance on the third
try to finish the first section in not more than 15 minutes second in 20 and then you have
25 minutes for the most difficult questions if your target is spent 8 or higher you should be
able to finish the first section in less than 15 minutes and finish all three in about 50
minutes to have 10 minutes to look for answers to questions you couldn't answer straight away
knowing which questions common order and which don't and having a strategy for each type of
question can help you find your answers more quickly the second biggest problem
in IELTS reading after the size of vocabulary is the reading speed there is a lot to read
and when we're learning a foreign language we usually read trying to understand each
word and it becomes a habit this is called intensive reading it is very slow this is when
you read each word one by one and when you don't understand something you go back and read it again
this is not good for IELTS reading in IELTS reading you should use extensive reading to
locate your answers this is when you read faster without perhaps understanding everything just
getting the general idea when you feel your answer is somewhere there you slow down switch
to intensive reading analyze the text determine the answer and then resume your extensive reading
how can you learn to read extensively there are a few exercises when you read each word
you pay a lot of attention to prepositions articles and other non-important words
we can actually see several words at a time so try to read phrases
another sign of intensive reading is if you pronounce each word in your head or maybe even
move your lips do you do that you may be reading like this all the time and it slows you down
we can read faster than we can speak so try to turn off the voice in your hand conversely when
you need to concentrate on the meaning and pay maximum attention move your lips reading each
word you also read faster if you stop re-reading bits you couldn't understand straight away maybe
they don't even matter and you're just wasting your time read looking for the answer to a
particular question and don't re-read anything unless you think your answer is there and the
ultimate solution to reading faster is reading more you know the first time I started reading the
financial times I felt brain fried pretty soon it was too much but it persevered and several months
later I noticed that I can read it with no obvious problem I get used to this level of complexity
you can find articles similar to IELTS reading if you go to BBC science it's free read your news
in English get your next book in English and don't forget to learn new words along the way
fundamentally IELTS is an English Language exam if you work on the skills you're lacking
you will improve and you will get to the level when you pass your test sometimes it
just takes a bit more time than you might have expected be patient and you definitely get there
and this is the video about questions that come in order which I mentioned
earlier thank you so much for watching me today good luck with your preparation and your exam