Things I call IELTS Reading Myths are things you might be doing in your IELTS reading that are not helping you boost your IELTS reading score.
In fact, they can hinder you from getting a good score. If your scores in reading are not reaching your target and you don't know why, then maybe you are doing some of these things.
I was working with a student yesterday on IELTS reading. This is a student that I've been working with for quite some time and I was quite surprised at a couple of things that had happened in the lesson. When he did some things that were really not helping him. We had talked about these several times and I thought they had been driven away from his reading activity quite a long time ago, but here he was still thinking about them and doing them (it takes quite some time to change habits completely).
So, what are these things?
They are some of the ‘tips and tricks’ that you sometimes hear about or find out about on YouTube or on other websites. Things that people tell you to do to improve the speed of your reading, but actually they don't improve speed and in fact, they stop you from finding the right answer altogether.
There are 3 in particular I want to highlight.
IELTS Reading Myth 1
- skim the whole passage before you start the questions, to get an idea about the topic.
I want to know why you would skim the passage when you don't know what information you need to find for the answers. To my mind, this practice is just wasting time. You can find out about the topic of the reading from the title. Most readings in IELTS, both general training and academic, will give you a title at the beginning of the passage. If there isn't a title, that usually means one of the questions will ask you to provide a title. So even when there isn't a title, I would not skim the whole passage. You might just look at the introduction perhaps, but in most cases the title and sometimes a subtitle is all you need in order for you to understand about the topic.
Now, the other danger with following this rule is that you may start underlining things randomly and this just creates confusion. Underlining should be mostly done in the questions. Where I see student work with lots of underlining in the passage and no underlining in the questions I am concerned. Focus should be on the questions. Therefore, any skimming, scanning, underlining or reading that is not directly related to the questions is wasting time and is distracting you from the actual questions.
IELTS Reading Myth 2
- things come in order.
Quite often some of the questions do come in order, but you shouldn't always expect this. I find lots of students tell me that the answer cannot be in a particular paragraph because the previous answer was in next paragraph. It doesn't always follow that things are in order. If you follow this rule then I think you're going to miss some easy answers because you'll never go back, you're always going forward. Forget about things being in order and just concentrate on the keywords and on finding those keywords in the text wherever they are.
I've often come across students who miss lots of very easy answers because they believe they've only got to go to the next paragraph and never backwards to a previous one and this isn't the case.
For the first question of a passage, then obviously you're going to start at the beginning. But if you are somewhere in the middle, there's no reason why the information you need can't be in the first paragraph just as much as in the last paragraph. So don't get fixated on the answers being in order. It's not necessarily the case. When you get to passage three, it's most often the case that you have to go backwards as well as forwards a little.
I've seen this go to such a degree that when a student finds a keyword in a sentence, they only read the words after the keyword and not the bit of the sentence before the keyword. This doesn't make any sense in language. You should always read the whole sentence to get a complete idea of what that sentence is saying. Again, you may lose easy answers - so forget this ‘rule’.
IELTS Reading Myth 3
– ignoring common sense
This came from a recent conversation with another student regrading a yes, no, not given question.
The student had answered ‘false’ for one of the questions. I said, it was clear that the answer was true. And he agreed, but stated he didn't have a ‘false’ answer yet (as the others had been true or not given). He believed you had to have a false answer, you had to have a not given answer and, you had to have a true answer. Why? I've seen exercises where all the answers were not given, or I've seen exercises where they're all true or they're all no. It’s perfectly possible, albeit unusual. Don't have these silly rules. It isn’t common sense. Simply look at the question, look at the information in the passage and match them together. There is no convention that says there will be two false, two not given and two true answers. If that were the case, then IELTS would be a lot easier! There is no rule about how many ‘false’, how many ‘true’, how many ‘yes’, how many ‘no’, or how many ‘not given’. What adopting this belief does is force you to play some kind of matching game rather than read and understand. Trust your common sense.
So don't do these things.
- Don't skim the whole passage before you do the questions.
- Don't believe that everything is in order.
- Don't ignore what you know to be true for some silly belief about the way the test works.
These things will just cost you marks.
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