IELTS Reading-Developing Academic Reading Skills

IELTS Reading Development Developing Academic Reading Skills IELTS Academic Reading tests students’ ability to read, understand and answer questions on a range of text types at a reasonably high level of difficulty. Both global reading skills (skills needed to comprehend the main ideas of a text) and micro-skills (skills needed to locate and interpret detailed information in the text) are tested. Students may be expected to understand opinion and attitude and be able to distinguish these from fact. They will also be expected to distinguish main ideas from supporting points. General Reading vs. Test Practice Students often feel that reading materials other than those from IELTS practice books are somehow irrelevant, and they may wish to do a great deal of test practice. While it is important to become familiar with the test, teachers should explain that improving their reading skills in general will inevitably improve their chances in the test, and that test practice alone may not result in this improvement of reading skills. What to Read In training students to take IELTS Academic Reading, it is important for teachers to concentrate on improving students’ reading skills in these areas, using generally available reading materials at a suitable level, rather than concentrating too much on test practice. Suitable practice materials might include book extracts; the editorial section of newspapers; feature articles (those which deal with topics of general interest rather than daily news); general interest magazines; journals. If none of these are available, reading texts from coursebooks could be used with specially adapted tasks provided by the teacher. How to Read Many students are unfamiliar with the idea of adapting their reading habits according to the text and the task. They may have been trained (at school, for example) to read every word slowly and carefully, and not to move on until they have understood everything. It is important to break these habits. The paragraphs which follow outline some of the skills that students need to acquire or practise. Guessing the meaning of unknown words from context Teachers can introduce this idea by offering sentences containing a nonsense word – for example ‘When I got home I found that the postman had delivered several xxxyls.’ – and asking questions such as What could a xxxyl be? (Answers might include a letter, a parcel, a magazine, a bill etc) – see the activity I’ve Never Seen That Word Before to practise this. Teachers could then move on to short paragraphs, using an unknown word in one or two of the sentences, preferably where the word would not have much impact on the general meaning of the sentence. Short periods of this sort of practice may move students away from the belief that an unknown word spells disaster. Activities where speed is emphasised Many students feel daunted by the idea that they must read quickly during the test. Any activity where speed is emphasised can help to break down the idea that reading slowly and carefully is the only way to understanding. Teachers could begin by setting very simple scanning tasks (asking students to locate names or other nouns that occur in the text). This can help to build up confidence. Teachers could then move on to ask students to locate simple synonyms (asking students to find a word meaning ‘a building’ – ‘house’ perhaps, or a word meaning ‘a vehicle’ – maybe ‘truck’.) Gradually increase the difficulty of the exercise; tasks should be moderately challenging, but should not be too far beyond the ability level of the majority of your students. Find It Fast is an activity that will help reinforce the idea of speed. Locating the Main Idea You can help your students to separate the main idea from attendant details by teaching them how paragraphs are constructed: a main idea expressed in a topic sentence which often comes at or close to the beginning of the paragraph, or sometimes at the end; explanations, examples or other detailed information designed to expand on or clarify the main idea See the activity Put It Together to assist with this. Vocabulary Any activity which helps to expand students’ vocabularies will be useful in helping them to perform tasks based on understanding paraphrase. Encourage your students to use learners’ dictionaries which offer a lot of example sentences to help them with usage. You should discourage the use of bilingual dictionaries which, while useful for elementary students, prevent more advanced students from experiencing the constant paraphrase practice they get from using an English-English dictionary. See the activity Paraphrase Quiz for assistance with this. Vocabulary of Special Interest It is important to make students aware of vocabulary which may occur frequently in certain text types. For example, in discussion texts, or those which report on a variety of opinions, students need to be familiar with a range of words and phrases such as ‘x agreed with/disagreed with/questioned the findings of y’, ‘x queried the validity of y’s data’ or ‘x claimed that y’s conclusions were not well-supported’. Further examples of statements of agreement or disagreement could be collected from a suitable text. Verbs used in quoting may also be useful for this type of text; you could for example, teach students to differentiate between words such as ‘stated’, ‘claimed’, ‘denied’, ‘admitted’, ‘implied’ etc. Language Development for Reading Comprehension Many of the reading skills candidates need for IELTS Academic Reading apply to all situations in which they need to read in English. Success in IELTS Academic Reading is influenced by the candidates’ ability to apply these skills, as well as their general proficiency in the English language. You can assist your students in applying these skills and develop their general proficiency in English by encouraging them to: expand their vocabulary guess the meaning of words in context understand the different forms of cohesion increase their understanding of English grammar More information about applying reading skills as well as ideas for classroom activities can be found through the links on the left. Vocabulary Development In order to understand a text written in English it is necessary to understand the majority of the words in the text. Encourage students to identify the types of words that are useful to learn – the ones that appear in many different texts – and to distinguish these from words that have low usage. Remind them that the meaning of very low frequency words, which are central to the comprehension of the text, will be given in a glossary. However, this only occurs infrequently. Encourage students to experiment with different ways of expanding their vocabulary. They can create their own vocabulary book and organise it either alphabetically or functionally. They should not only write the meaning of words in their own language, but write many examples of its usage in English. They can also write synonyms and antonyms as well as words representing bigger categories to which this word belongs. Guessing the Meaning of Words from Context Students should be encouraged to try to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words using clues in the context. These clues may be in the surrounding words. The text may provide a definition that explains the unfamiliar word, or it may give examples to illustrate the unfamiliar word. There may be connecting words used after the familiar word that indicate similarity or contrast. If the student is familiar with the item that is being compared or contrasted this should provide a clue to the unknown word. Another strategy is to break the word down into syllables. Sometimes knowledge of common roots and affixes or similarity to words in the students’ own language can help them guess the meaning of a particular word. Cohesion It is important to develop in students an awareness of the different ways that the meanings in one sentence in a text are connected with the meanings in other sentences. There are a number of different ways of showing connections between sentences. These include: the use of reference words such as pronouns (it, he, she, this, those etc.) and the use of articles (first reference may be with ‘a’ and the next references to the same thing with ‘the’) the use of words referring to the same thing; either the same word repeated or synonyms or class terms used the use of connecting words to show the relationship in meaning such as ‘also’, ‘as a result’ and ‘in contrast’ the use of substitution words such as ‘such’ or ‘so’ that take the place of whole phrases or sentences the omission of words that the reader is expected to understand because they were used in a previous sentence   Grammar and Meaning It is important to develop students’ understanding of English grammar so that they know when difference sentence structures are used to convey the same meaning and when different sentence structures convey a difference in meaning. They should know, for example, that a sentence such as ‘The ancient Olympics were abolished by the Roman Emperor Theodosius’ has the same meaning as ‘The Roman Emperor Theodosius abolished the ancient Olympics’. The same meaning can be expressed using the passive voice of the verb and the active voice of the verb. Similarly, they should know that a change in the tense of the verb, for example, may make the meaning in a statement quite different. A sentence such as ‘The Scandinavians have objected to a winter games’ means something quite different from ‘The Scandinavians object to a winter games’.