The IELTS academic reading test is a massive headache for a lot of candidates. You need to answer forty questions about three texts that can be in excess of one thousand words each. This is a huge amount to process in just one hour. However, it is far from impossible to achieve a high score and many people are able to score band 8 or 9 by simply having a good method for approaching the test.
In this article, I will explain some straightforward tips and tricks that will help you master the reading exam and boost your IELTS score. Follow these 10 easy tips and you will be on your way to success.
1. Don’t try to understand everything
The first thing that you need to know when you begin to study for IELTS academic reading is that you do not need to understand every word that is written in the texts. This is a huge surprise for many people who think that reading is all about understanding 100% of the material, but that’s not the purpose of this exam. Instead, you are required to search the text quickly and effectively, then extract the relevant information according to the questions.
2. Boost your reading speed
With just one hour to complete forty questions across three different reading texts, you need to be a fast and effective reader. If you go too slowly, you simply won’t have time to answer all the questions, and this would lead to disaster. Whilst it is important to consider the information from Tip #1, you also need to read quickly. This is a skill that is challenging for people using any language, but there are different ways to do it. You can download various apps to practise, or else you can simply read articles every day to improve your natural speed.
3. Skimming and scanning
Related to the above two tips, you need to learn how to skim and scan an article. To put it simply, skimming means looking very briefly over the article to pick out the main idea (the gist). This means looking at headings, sub-headings, captions, and so on. Then, you can scan. Scanning means going through very quickly to pick out specific words after you have looked through the list of questions. This helps you with Tips #1 and #2 because you can drastically increase your speed and accuracy by overlooking all non-important parts of a text. After that, you can spend a short amount of time close reading to find the right answer. A combination of these approaches will help you get a great IELTS score.
4. Learn to think in terms of synonyms
When you try scanning the text for answers, don’t make the mistake of scanning for the same words that you saw in the questions. If it asks, “How long does the average shipping container take to arrive?” you will not find words like “how long”, “average,” and “arrive.” Instead, you will search the text for words and phrases with the same meaning. It might say, for example, “Shipping containers typically take around three weeks to reach their destination.” Here, “three weeks” answers “how long,” “typically” means the same as “average,” and “reach their destination” means the same as “arrive.” This is one of the most important skills you can learn, and it’s why having a varied vocabulary is essential.
5. Work on your grammar skills
This might seem a little strange as technically you are not assessed on grammar for IELTS reading. It is part of the speaking and writing criteria instead. However, grammar is always important in language and it can definitely help you for IELTS academic reading. For example, it can guide you to the answer if the question is related to time. Knowing the past perfect tense from the past simple tense could help you to work out when something happened and mastering the passive voice could help you to figure out who was responsible for something. In addition, some questions such as sentence completion are much easier to solve once you think about parts of speech like verbs and nouns and adjectives.
6. Learn the different question types… and practise them!
While we are on the subject of things like sentence completion, it is worth mentioning that there are various types of questions that could appear in IELTS reading. These will not be random and there is not an infinite number of them. Rather, there is a small collection of common question types: multiple choice, matching headings, sentence completion, short answer, and so on. If you spend some time reviewing these, you will grow familiar with the particular skills needed to find those answers. No matter what the subject of the passage, you would just apply the usual skills and search for the correct answer.
7. Don’t waste time; just move on
Sometimes in IELTS academic reading, you will encounter a question that is too difficult to answer. Unless you reasonably expect to get a band 9 and choose every correct answer, you should not worry too much about this. Instead, think tactically: If you waste ten minutes searching for this one answer, you will run out of time. That is a bad thing because you have many other answers to find. Each answer is just worth one single point, so you should abandon any troublesome one and move on to the next. Of course, you should aim to leave no blank spaces because…
8. You should always take a guess
Continuing on from the last point, whilst you shouldn’t waste time on questions that you don’t know the answer to, you also should not leave those answers blank. Instead, if you really cannot find the correct answer, then make an educated guess. This means choosing some sort of answer to write, even if you are not entirely sure. For example, you might have a multiple choice question with five possibilities. If you know that two are incorrect, then you could pick one of the remaining three. Even if you are wrong, you will not have any points deducted from your IELTS band score. Therefore, it is logical to make this guess as long as it does not eat into your time.
9. Think logically
IELTS academic is a language test first and foremost, but it is also a thinking test. You don’t need to be a genius to get a good score, but having some logical awareness is helpful. In the reading exam, this can help you because sometimes you will not be able to figure out an answer throughout linguistic abilities alone. Instead, you have to use reasoning and deduction to work out an answer. That means inferring the right answer from a subtle meaning or filling a gap where your vocabulary was not sufficient by intuiting the right meaning.
10. Finally, don’t forget spelling…
IELTS candidates often worry about spelling when it comes to the writing test, but it also affects their score for listening and reading. This is because you still have to write words down on the answer paper. If you wrote it in the wrong way, you would not get given a point. For example, if the answer was “BRITISH” and you wrote “BRATISH” then you would not get a point, even though the examiner would presumably know your intended meaning. Don’t worry, though. You would never be asked to write any really obscure words. The vocabulary for answers is actually very simple compared to that in the passages. However, it pays to double check your answers at the end to see if you have made some mistakes. A really common one is to write TURE or FLASE instead of TRUE or FALSE. Making such a simple mistake could be costly to your overall IELTS score, so be wary and don’t let this happen to you.
