Hi! I'm Clever Apple! I got Band 8.0 on IELTS Reading and I'm studying Master of Education (TESOL) at Wollongong university in Australia.
Today, I will tell you some tips to improve your reading score band effectively and efficiently.
■Outline■
・This article is about 'How to get Band 6.0 on IELTS Reading, which is required to meet to enter many Western universities.
・The strategies are ①Understand the question format ②Read through the whole scripts ③Start a timer, read the script 3 times, and write some expressions you don't know on your wordbook.
・The strategies are ①Understand the question format ②Read through the whole scripts ③Start a timer, read the script 3 times, and write some expressions you don't know on your wordbook.
1. Understand the question format
Firstly, it is important to know the question format to get a high score on reading.
This can be applied to any tests, and without knowing the format, you can't study efficiently.
Many bloggers and books explain about the pattern, and you can learn that by yourself through reading the scripts, I will skip the details.
Once you have understood the test format, you should buy or borrow some books about IELTS.
My recommendation is 'IELTS 16 Academic Student's Book with Answers with Audio with Resource Bank (IELTS Practice Tests)'.
リンク
This is official IELTS book published by Cambridge English.
As I mentioned before, I didn't have money to buy those books, so I went to the university library and borrowed almost all of the books and read them.
The contents of the articles in IETLS were interesting for me, so I read them with fun.
Through reading a lot of articles in books, you can strengthen your background knowledge about various topics. Thus, if you cannot understand the sentences in English, you can answer the questions with your background knowledge.
Reading a variety of articles have many merits to improve your reading skills.
In the next section, I will explain 'how to use the materials'.
2. How to use the books
The next step is to solve the questions in the books.
The 3 steps for reading are
①Solve the questions
②Look up some expressions and words you don't know in the dictionary and understand the article
③Review what you learnt through 3-times reading.
In terms of the first step, I personally recommend 'Read all of the sentences'.
Some people claim that 'You shouldn't read all of the sentences, because you don't have enough time to read them. You should learn scanning and skimming and just read some important parts.'
However, I don't agree with this idea, because you have to read all of the sentences to answer 'TRUE, FALSE, and NOT GIVEN' questions.
You can find the parts about TRUE and FALSE, but not NOT GIVEN without reading the whole script.
Rather than learning reading strategies, such as scanning and skimming, I think you should simply improve your reading speed.
As for me, I read the whole articles and I had an extra time to double-check my answers.
When you finish solving the questions, check the answers and completely understand the scripts in your first language.
Until you can understand the meaning of the sentences, you should read the articles many times.
The final step is explained in the next section.
3. Read the articles 3 times
The final step is about how to review what you read.
You can review by
①Starting a timer and reading the script 3 times.
and
②writing some expressions and words in your wordbook.
First, measure the time you take to read the script 3 times. The time would be shorter as you read.
Through this practice, you can remember expressions you didn't know and you can read English sentences more quickly.
Finally, write some expressions and words you learned as example sentences in your wordbook.
This is because you can remember such expressions in contexts you are familiar with, including a story you have read.
Acquiring many expressions can lead to improving other sub-skills such as Speaking and Writing!!
4. Summary
・In this article, I introduced some tips for learning IELTS reading.
・The strategies are ①Understand the question format ②Read through the whole scripts ③Start a timer, read the script 3 times, and write some expressions you don't know on your wordbook.
・The strategies are ①Understand the question format ②Read through the whole scripts ③Start a timer, read the script 3 times, and write some expressions you don't know on your wordbook.
There are also articles about IELTS, so please check them too!!
■Please also see these!■
Good luck with the exam :)
