Self-Study English

Tag: reading

  • 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.

  • High quality input for advanced learners to help prepare for the IELTS exam

    In the previous blog post, I mentioned how extensive reading (especially graded readers) can be a useful source of input. One of the advantages of using graded readers is that they are available at different levels and so it is easy for people of all abilities to find a suitable book. However, if you are an advanced level learner of English, you might be ready to read and listen to texts that have not been adapted for learners. Obviously, this can be quite difficult, but it also gives you a much wider range of texts to choose from.

    For the IELTS exam, you will need to read ‘three long texts which range from the descriptive and factual to the discursive and analytical. These are taken from books, journals, magazines and newspapers.’ Obviously, the word ‘factual’ is important here, so if you want to read texts that are similar in style to the IELTS test, then you need to be careful about what kinds of texts you choose to read.

    First of all, you probably wouldn’t want to focus on reading novels as these are not factual texts. I would also advise against reading anything too political as the IELTS exam doesn’t really do politics. Also, news articles don’t seem to appear in the IELTS test as they go out-of-date very quickly. You probably want to focus more on texts that cover a range of topics but are perhaps written in a slightly more formal style for an educated audience and will still be relevant at least a year after they have been written.

    There are quite a few magazines that report studies on a range of topics for a non-specialist audience. These kinds of magazines are easier to read than academic journals and are probably quite similar in style and language to many of the texts that you might find on an IELTS exam. They are also not too long to read, so will be similar in length to the IELTS exam. Here are some links to a few different science magazines that might be interesting and useful to read:

    https://www.newscientist.com/

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/

    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl

    https://www.sciencemag.org/

    https://www.sciencefocus.com/

    https://www.discovermagazine.com/

    https://www.the-scientist.com/

    When looking for articles to read, it would be a good idea to try and find articles that are not too specific and are of general interest to most people as these are the kinds of texts that are likely to appear in the IELTS exam.

    You can also choose appropriate sections from newspapers and online news sites to help you find suitable articles, e.g. from the BBC website, you might find some interesting articles from any of the Culture, Future, Travel or Business sections. You can also use newspapers to find interesting articles in the science sections of newspapers such as The Guardian, The New York Times and The Australian. Culture, Travel and Lifestyle sections might also have interesting and useful articles from online newspapers.

    When it comes to listening material, the BBC also has a wide range of podcasts to choose from. If you are not familiar with podcasts, you will want to download a podcast player to your phone, so that you can search for podcasts and add them to your feed. You will then be notified when a new episode is available. I use an app called Player.fm, which works well for me but there are lots of different ones available.

    The BBC has lots of different podcasts available, so one of the best places to start might be the BBC World Service, which is aimed at people around the world rather than just a British audience. One podcast that is quite interesting is called The Big Idea, which has a range of interesting topics that I could imagine appearing in the IELTS exam. It is also quite short, so you could easily listen to it in less than fifteen minutes, e.g. on the MRT or bus to work, university, etc. Unfortunately, they have stopped producing episodes, but there are still plenty of old episodes to listen to. Another short BBC podcast that is no longer produces new episode, but has a large number of older episdoes to listen to is 50 Things that Made the Modern Economy. It deals with a range of topics related to inventions, ideas and innovations, so is likely to cover many topics that would appear on the IELTS test.

    Another short podcast from the BBC that I like to listen to is called More or Less: Behind the Stats. Whilst it does talk about Coronavirus rather a lot and is a bit biased towards UK news, it obviously talks a lot about statistics too so could be quite useful to help you review describing statistics (part 1 writing).

    A few other BBC podcasts that I have listened to are: Deeply Human (about the science behind human experiences), Science in Action (about science in the news), Discovery (about science in general), Crowd Science and The Inquiry (about ideas in the news).

    Obviously, for advanced learners, there are lots of different material available that could be useful and interesting for you, so if you have any suggestions, then please feel free to post them in the comments.