I should have published this post last week, but felt unsatisfied with the content. Therefore, after hours of writing, and cutting, again and again, today we’ve got this one – maybe I’ll have an updated version when something new needs to be added.
These are just a few problems I’ve collected from my students when they have to deal with the reading exercises. Some told me they felt overwhelmed right from the start with much alien vocabulary. Also, from their perspective, such “haunting” exercises as matching headings and diagram/sentence completion are the “killing elements” when finishing a reading exercise.
These would definitely lead to a desperate death spiral of confusion and demotivation. Besides, difficulties in understanding a reading text or a question make students spend more time on those unfamiliar words. Time management is an indispensable factor contributing to success in every aspect of life, not just limited to completing a reading exercise. In short, disappointed students get confused when reading without understanding much of the content, spend hours feeling hopeless, and then get freaked out by the wordy exercises.
My advice for this situation is just to try to read as much as you can. It sounds kinda stupid, doesn’t it?
There is some justification for this piece of advice. To begin with, reading as much as possible allows us to encounter new words and sentence structure, and the more we read, the more we familiarize ourselves with them. Moreover, please take some time to think back on when we were completely incapable of reading in our native language. We did struggle, right? So what has made us to be fluent and understand almost everything we read? It’s time and effort to get used to the language’s components. Therefore, there is no shortcut when it comes to learning another language.
But what about those who have only a few months before their IELTS test? Uhmm… I’ve got some instant solutions:
- Don’t panic
Be calm and focus on the information in the passage, not your prior knowledge. A reading test isn’t designed to test how much you know, but to check how you utilize what you’re provided within the text in order to show your understanding of the language.
- Be selective
Try your best to be selective about what to focus more on. For example, strange words like terminologies in a reading passage can trouble some students. However, those are often explained either by definition or from other clues, such as their function or the impact they have on others. Likewise, for other unfamiliar elements, you can base on such relationships to overcome the hardship.
For example, when you don’t know what “reservoir” means (in passage 1 – test 1 – IELTS practice test plus 2), you can somewhat guess its meaning from the context – a kind of water body or something similar.
- Division
Some students may find it hard to comprehend a single sentence even though they know all the words in that sentence. This is mainly due to the sophisticated sentence structures. In such cases, I suggest taking a closer look by dividing the sentences into smaller units. By this, I mean we should identify which words/phrases serve which functions. Try asking: What is the subject of this sentence? What is the function of this clause, etc? This also requires every student to have a profound understanding of grammar.
I don’t want to make this post a written lecture on grammar or the like, so below are the illustrations for some of the points that we need to be careful about in order to have not-too-shallow comprehension of a reading text:
Don’t mistake an empty subject as a reference:
This is a reference:
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