How to Use IELTS Reading Texts

When doing practice IELTS reading tests, it’s important that you do not just to use them as test practice, but also to use them to help develop your language skills. Here is a suggested procedure for how you can use IELTS reading tests to help you both practice the test and also develop your language skills at the same time.

First of all, I would suggest that you get a general idea of what the text is about before looking at the questions. If you are a fast reader, you may decide to quickly read the whole text first before looking at the questions, but for most students, I think this will take too much time.

To get a general idea of a text, I would suggest looking at the following parts of a text:

• Title of the text (most important part)
• The first paragraph (this is likely to include some kind of general introduction to the topic, and will therefore help to give a general idea of the text)
• The first sentence of each paragraph (these are often similar to topic sentences that you use in your writing, and often give a general idea/summary of what the paragraph will be about)
• The final paragraph (these often contain some kind of conclusion or summary, which includes more general ideas than much of the rest of the text)

By reading these parts of the text, you should be able to get a general idea of what the whole text is about. This will give you a better understanding of the text, and therefore should help you when answering questions about specific parts of the text.

Once you have completed the IELTS answers, I would suggest that you read through the whole text again, and try to summarise to yourself (you can make notes if you wish) what the main ideas of the text were. You may also want to ask questions to yourself about the text such as:

• What did I learn from reading this text?
• Is there anything from the text that was surprising? If so, why?
• Which parts of the text did I most agree with? If so, why?
• Is there anything that I disagree with? If so, why?
• Are there any parts that I didn’t understand? If so, what made them difficult?

Asking yourself these kinds of questions can help you think about the text more deeply and therefore be more likely to better understand the text. This means that you will then thus process some of the language better and improve your language skills more.

After doing this, you can then focus on some individual words and phrases that you have found in the text, which may be new to you. However, you do not necessarily want to try and learn every new word you see in a text as there will likely be quite a few words that are not very common, and so will not be very useful for you to learn. Instead, it is better to focus on those words which are more common, and so more useful.

There are two types of vocabulary that students should focus on. The first type is frequent general vocabulary as these make up most words in a text. You can find out how to use a dictionary and other resources to help identify these words in this blog post. More advanced learners may also like to also focus on mid-frequency vocabulary too (see this blog post).

The second type of vocabulary to focus on is academic words. These words are especially important for the IELTS exam (and when studying at university). You can use this blog post to learn more about academic words and help you identify academic words from a text.