by Dr Rodrigo Arellano and Gizem Sahin
There is, naturally, a difference between reading for pleasure and reading in the IELTS exam. I feel compelled to mention this difference, though, as it goes a long way to explaining why so many students dislike doing extensive practice of the IELTS Reading paper. Generally, the texts that I have seen in the IELTS are well-written, but they have not been written to entertain the reader - they are to test the reader’s reading skills, and not in the sense of ‘Did you see the ending coming in The Da Vinci Code?’ but rather in terms of professional or academic reading.
Candidates need to apply a variety of reading strategies to navigate the demands of the test. In some parts of the test, the idea is to locate answers quickly rather than achieve deep comprehension (Chalmers & Walkinshaw, 2014). At other times, they need to understand how reference works in the text to be able to answer questions of a more structural nature (Tse, 2023). The mental adaptability of our students is crucial for success in the Reading paper, as on top of everything else, the candidate must also manage their time (Nosrati, 2015).
To help your students - and you, their teacher - with managing the demands of the Reading paper, here are three activities you might like to try out.
Activity 1. The Examiner Student
Many students struggle with the True/False/Not Given (for Facts, or information in the text that can be verified) or Yes/No/Not Given (for Claims, which are opinion-based statements) reading task, as it isn’t always clear to them whether a piece of information is False/No or Not Given. We can help by making them into examiners, so that they can see behind the scenes, so to speak.
Start by providing your students with a short text - no more than a paragraph long. Ask them to find example facts or claims in the text, and to make note of these.
When your students have found three or four facts or claims in the text, give them some dice, and for each of the points they’ve noticed, they roll the die:
1 or 2: Yes/True
3 or 4: No/False
5 or 6: Not Given
For each statement in their list, they roll the die and then paraphrase the statement accordingly.
For example, if the text says “Krakow was the capital of Poland from 1038 to 1596, before being superseded by Warsaw.” The student might be able to isolate two facts here - first, the period for which Krakow served as Polish capital, and second, the capital after Krakow.
For the first statement, let’s imagine they rolled a 1; their paraphrased version might be: “Krakow was the capital of Poland for approximately half a millennium.”
For the second statement, let’s imagine they rolled a 3; they might then write: “Warsaw was the capital of Poland before being replaced by Krakow.”
If the student were to roll a 5, they might add another statement: “Krakow was a more popular capital city than Warsaw.”
When they have prepared enough test statements, you can give the text and the task to a different pair of students in the usual manner - or pin the new exam tasks up around the room so that your students can circulate and attempt as many as possible. Then it’ll be time for feedback - and your Examiner Students will be able to explain what the right answers are for their text.
Activity 2. Student Strategists
Teach your students to skim the text to identify where the answers are most likely to be located. For instance, if the text is a biography, the information will most likely be presented chronologically, though the first sentence or two will likely highlight the contributions made by the person before sending us back to the beginning of their lives.
I like to tell my students that IELTS candidates are like ‘hunters’ who know where the prey could be hidden. Maybe they will not know the exact spot, but they will know the area, and this will facilitate the reading comprehension process. Just as a hunter might look for tracks in the mud or broken twigs, I tell my students of the different strategies they can use in the Reading paper, and when each one fits best.
Here are some of the most common pairings, with the task type on the left and the strategy on the right.
- Matching headings: Look at the topic sentences
- Matching specific information: Focus on supporting details
- Flow chart labels: Located in one or two paragraphs (usually together)
- Main/general/global idea (or gist): First and/or last paragraph
- Multiple choice: Skim for specific words that can be detected most readily, such as numbers, names of people, technical concepts, theories, pieces of art, among others.
In all cases, it is suitable to examine the questions first to know what they will be looking for. Your students might like to try using a ‘zigzag motion’ to read the text, return to a question if they find the answer, and then go to the text again. Despite individual differences in how the questions may be approached, reading the full text and then the full list of questions (or vice versa) is not the best approach, as memory is fragile, and the texts contain a lot of specific information.
The strategies that work best vary person to person, but unless our students are familiar with the strategies that are available, and unless they have the chance to practice these strategies, they’ll never know what works best for them.
I also encourage my students to become more self-reflective exam-takers. Before, during, or after each practice, they should ask themselves: Are these question types easy or difficult for me? Which should be the first text I should read? Do I have some prior knowledge that will help or impede my understanding? Did I answer the questions based on what I found in the text, or on my own suppositions?
Such questions matter; without thinking about the experience, one test practice will run into another, and the student might find their progress has stalled.
Activity 3: Drawing Predictions
As soon as the candidate begins reading the instructions to the task, they should start making predictions. We are trained to do this in the real world without even realising this - show your students a book and they will make an immediate judgment about it based on the cover alone - but the exam requires students to take this up a gear or two.
The candidate can look at the title of the text and any pictures to get an idea of the topic, and a glance at the layout of the text might be enough to suggest what genre of writing has been chosen.
The questions can also be fertile terrain for the candidate’s imagination. Since the order of the questions and the appearance of the answers in the text usually go hand in hand (so the answer for question two will likely appear between the answers for questions one and three, unless the question is about the candidate’s global understanding of the text), it is worth reading the question, predicting the kind of information that is being sought, and then looking at the relevant part of the text to see if the prediction was correct - and if it revealed the answer.
However, one problem we have encountered when teaching prediction strategies is that students are happy to discuss them, but the moment they start a Reading task all those ideas simply go out of the window. They don’t try to predict anything - they just start reading.
To solve this, a creative strategy is to give them the questions first without the accompanying passage, and ask them to draw what they think the content will be from reading only the questions (I include examples below).
Once your students have drawn their pictures, they could show them to a partner, who has to guess what the ideas are that the first student has chosen to represent. This is a good way to add a bit more speaking to your reading classes, which otherwise can become rather silent affairs.
(Source: author’s students)
Of course, the next step is to give the students the texts so that they can answer the questions. The key ingredient here, though, is to have a follow-up discussion about the students’ ability to predict the content of the reading task. In some cases, this might be the key that unlocks the whole idea of using strategies in the exam.
Conclusion
I want my students to enjoy reading as much as possible, and in the long term, I’d love all of my students to read for pleasure in English. But I also want to equip them with the skills they need to tackle the Reading paper in the IELTS, and with these three activities, they can make a positive start.
References
Chalmers, J., and Walkinshaw, I. (2014), Reading strategies in IELTS tests: prevalence and impact on outcomes, EA Journal, 30(1), 24-39.
Nosrati, V. (2015), Reading Test-taking Strategies in General Training IELTS, Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 6(5), 134-142.
Tse, D. (2023), Developing the Sub-skill of Identifying Reference in Reading, The International House Journal #51
Author Biographies
Rodrigo Arellano
EFL and Spanish language teacher from Chile who lives and works in Sydney, Australia, where he studied for his PhD in Applied and Educational Linguistics. He is passionate about TESOL teacher training and has taught and researched various language-related fields, including Second Language Acquisition, Discourse Analysis, Research Methodology, Multilingualism and Assessment.
Gizem Sahin
Experienced language educator specialising in ESL/EFL/EAP and Turkish as a heritage/second language. Proficient in face-to-face and online learning settings for diverse learners, including, young learners, adults, undergraduates and professionals. Holds qualifications in TESOL, applied linguistics, and language teaching management, alongside certifications in assessment, training design and development. Passionate about empowering ESL students and fostering cultural connections through education.