IELTS Reading can be overwhelming. 14 question types to tackle. Long, complex passages on challenging topics you may not be familiar with.
You are so frustrated with not getting results despite all your hard work, you didn’t know what else to do but eat your feelings.
Hush hush now, you are not alone. Just like thousands of other students not making progress in IELTS Reading, perhaps you are making some of these unfortunate but fundamental mistakes.
Tip #1: Learning English ≠ Learning to ace the IELTS exam
In your quest to conquer IELTS, you may have heard and heeded these ‘advices’:
“Immerse yourself in English. Read an English newspaper everyday.”
Sure, if you want to acquire a language and converse naturally, immerse yourself in it. However, that does not do much for your IELTS Reading ability. Or even worse, some of you may bring the bad habits of spending a long time digesting newspaper articles into your IELTS Reading, and end up with time management problems.
Acing IELTS Reading is about mastering the skills and techniques in finding answers. Period. If you spend too much time everyday trying to stuff your mind with English reading materials, your IELTS Reading skill may get neglected and rusty. The only way to get better – Practice. Practice. And practice.
Tip #2: Read the first sentence of the paragraph
Don’t dive into each paragraph and try to read everything. Yes, we know it’s tempting to do that.
But you would have wasted so much time on just one question.
Make it a strict rule to firstly understand what the question is asking you.
Then, quickly scan the first sentence of each paragraph. If the sentence matches with what the question is asking for, BINGO!
Now, you can spend more time reading for meaning for the paragraph to answer your question. If not, move on to the next paragraph.
To help you memorise this rule, here is a simple flow chart:
Tip #3: Be very disciplined in managing your time
Some teachers may advise that you need to spend at most 20 minutes per passage in a one-hour reading test. But the reality is, content gets progressively more difficult. Passage one is usually the easiest and passage three is usually the most difficult. If you have an hour, you should spend at least 30 minutes on passage three. We recommend splitting your time to 10 minutes for passage one, 20 minutes for passage two, and 30 minutes for passage three.
Here is a sweet pie chart to help you manage your time better in tackling three passages:
We hope you can make use of these tips to master your IELTS Reading skills.
Read on!
