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.