Tips for Teachers

• Remind students to read the instructions carefully. The instructions will tell them where to find the answers, what they need to do, what kind of answer is required of them and how many words they need to write. The instructions will also tell them if an answer can be used more than once and remind them to transfer their answers to the Answer Sheet.
• Remind students that for many, but not all, task types the questions follow the order of information in the reading passage.
• Encourage students to read all the questions very carefully.
• Encourage students to scan for key words in the extracts or the reading passage that match the items. Encourage students to also scan for paraphrases of key words.
• Remind students that in most cases, e.g. Short-answer Questions, the answers have to be grammatically correct and should be spelt correctly. Accuracy in spelling and word form are very important and candidates will be penalised for incorrect spelling.
• Remind students that in Sentence Completion tasks, they must focus on the meaning when choosing the correct endings.
• Encourage students to use the information provided in the notes, tables, diagrams or flow-charts as well as any examples to predict the type of information that is required.
• In classroom activities, encourage students to discuss the type of information they need for each item type.
• Encourage students to underline key words and phrases when they read as well as paying attention to key words in the questions.
• Give students practice in recognising synonyms, summary words etc. to help them locate information.
• Give students practice in suggesting different ways of expressing the same ideas or information in a text.
• Encourage students to think about what certain pieces of information have in common – shared features – and what distinguishes them from each other.
• Give students practice in reading skills such as skimming and scanning for information.
• Some students are convinced that only test practice will really help them, and want to do test after test. This can be discouraging, as they do not see the rapid progress they would like. Encourage them to read widely, e.g. newspapers, journals, magazines and books, and use materials from these sources in your classroom activities.
• Make your students aware of the different text types and how best to approach them. Give practice in the full range of IELTS General Training Reading item types. Take time in class to discuss the differences between item types and the skills that are being tested.
• You should make sure that your students understand that there is more than one way to read a text. Some believe that they must read every text slowly and carefully, underlining every unknown word and stopping to worry about it. You should stress that their main aim is to locate the answers to the questions. They do not need to read in the same way they would if they needed to remember the contents of the texts. You should try to desensitize them to the presence of unknown words, and also give practice in guessing meaning from context. Discourage them from looking up every unknown word in the dictionary.
• Make sure that students read the instructions carefully in every case: many task types contain variations, and it is easy for students to confuse them if they do not check carefully what it is they are required to do.
• Stress that students should remain conscious of time limits, and that they should move on rather than spend too much time on a particular question to which they are unable to find the answer.
• Make students aware of the dangers of relying on locating the exact words in the text that they find in a question: give as much practice as you can in paraphrasing and locating paraphrase in a text.
• In item types where the information is located in order in the text, train students to avoid returning to the beginning of the text for each question.
• Remind students that, in the majority of cases, any words they need to write will be in the text. Advise them to take care when copying a word or words from the text onto their Answer Sheets. Copying incorrectly will lead to loss of marks.
• Make sure that students get some practice in using an Answer Sheet.