The one thing that a lot of people post about or ask questions about when it comes to IELTS Reading is the timing. IELTS Students often tell me they have a problem with the timing. However, in my experience, their problem is rarely timing. This is because if you can do the reading well and answer most of the questions correctly, then the timing will never really be an issue. So, if you're struggling with the timing, I would say it probably has nothing to do with timing per se but will most likely a problem of technique or strategy or simply that your English is not yet good enough to complete enough questions for a high band within 1 hour.
The answer
to this problem (and most students dismiss this strategy 
), is to forget about the time totally and just work on obtaining the right answers. It's amazing how many students I speak to and work with who start out by timing themselves against the clock rather than training themselves to answer the questions – ‘the cart before the horse’.
What happens when the timing is the dominant feature is panic sets in and many students end up guessing or randomly choosing answers instead of really matching the text with the questions. Doing the reading this way doesn’t guarantee a good score.
If you are having this experience with the reading test then you're never going to be able to manage a high band in 60 minutes unless you focus on locating the correct answers. Or, it will take a very long time to achieve your target.
The solution is - forget the time! Take your time, do the questions and just work on getting the right answers. As soon as you're getting most of them correct, then you can start to think about the time.
In my experience, and remember, I've been teaching IELTS for over 25 years, once students can get a high score consistently, then the timing will sort itself.
The reading process I use is almost foolproof. It's the process I teach all my students. It's the process we use in IELTS Champions Club and it works.
It’s the process that has got several of my students Band 9 in reading and most of them Band 8 or 8.5
Typically, the students who use this process will, with practice, be getting 35, 36, (sometimes all of the answers correct) before they reach their exam and they will be able to do it in about 50 to 55 minutes.
I've had thousands of students over the years and this is how I taught all of them to tackle IELTS Reading.
Question Types:
There are some questions which we call global questions, and these test your overall understanding of parts of the text, perhaps the text in its entirety.
For example, Headings - to get a heading correct, you need to understand the paragraph. What is it telling you? Or Summaries where you need to use information contained in a paragraph or across part of the whole text.
These kinds of questions need a global understanding of either a section of the text or the whole text. And you cannot do it by just using two or three words.
The other type of question is more specific and tests detail so you have to read the sentence much more carefully.
Questions like Sentence Completion where you're looking for specific words, TFNG and YNNG, Short Answers - you're looking for specific words and you deal with them differently.
The global questions need you to do more skimming and the more specific questions need you to do more scanning. So, it's important to understand the difference between skimming and scanning and it's also important to understand when you need to skim and when you need to scan.
Now let's look at the process.
- Step 1 - You can get an overview of the topic from the title. If there's a subheading or a subtitle, you should read that. If there is no title, then chances are you're going to get a question about giving it a title.
In that case, you can skim the first paragraph to get the gist of the text. But don’t read any more - it's a waste of time.
Wasting time on things which won’t help is one of the main reasons students cannot manage their time.
- Now go straight to the first question.
Sometimes people skim the passage, but I think that is a waste of time. What's important in the reading is to get to the questions
Start with question one. Don't jump around be systematic and don’t leave heading questions to the end they MUST be done at the beginning as they will help you with all the other questions!
Focus on the question. Read every bit of the question, every single word, because that's where you'll find the clues to the answer - in the way that the question has been written.
Read the question carefully, choose 3 or 4 keywords.
Now ask yourself 'What do I need to do here? What do I need to find out?’ Paraphrase the question so it’s really clear what exactly you have to do.
- Go to the text, use the keywords, find the place, work out the answer, then go back and check.
Does that fit the question? If it's clear, fine. If not, go back. But don't do this too often. If you're starting to get a bit panicky or you can't find it, then just let it go – there will be time later to check again.
- Now work systematically through all the questions one by one. Spend just 1-minute per question and if you cannot find the answer leave the question and move on. You have to do this or you will run out of time. There will be plenty of time if you do this to go back and check – after the question section, at the end of the passage or at the end of the test.
That’s the process - simple, step by step and focused.
Keywords - you absolutely need these. These are integral to the whole process. I know some people say, you don't need keywords.
I'm a native speaker. I have a degree in English. I've been teaching since 1977. I've been teaching IELTS for over 25 years. I love reading, and yet I don't think I could do the IELTS reading without keywords.
These are really vital for speed and accuracy. Whenever a student, in my experience makes a mistake, especially with a question, like YNNG, the reason will be they have missed a key word. So personally, I think they're vital. The more you have, the easier it will be to find the right place and the right answer.
Let's say you have a topic on ‘The Environment’ and you pick a keyword environment. Environment is going to be all over that reading. So how will you know which is the exact place? You will only know if you have other keywords that are associated with it. For example, ‘the environment in the past’, that narrows it down. You might have the environment in the past in Europe. Again, that narrows it down. The more keywords you have, the easier it will be to actually find the right place.
There are two kinds of keyword. One will find you the location and the others will find the exact answer. For instance, with the environment example, if it said the environment in the past in Europe. You found the place through those words.
So those help you get the location. But then they might have asked you something about ‘most people’. Now, that word ‘most’ is really important to answer the question because when you get to the place - is it most people or is it just one or two people?
These are the kinds of questions that should be going around in your head as you're looking for the answer.
In the video which accompanies this article I have a worked example of the IELTS Reading Process – go to the video to watch my Reading Process in action.
Just to reiterate, you don’t need to time your reading practice straight away, you need to firstly know how to do the questions well. Once you can do them well and you've practised, then generally the timing will not be a problem.
And this really does work.
You mustn't worry about leaving a question. I think that's often the problem. People are very reluctant to leave a question and come back and you have to force yourself to do it because the problem with sticking with a question is you start to panic more and the more you panic, the less likely you are to find that answer.
If you're leaving too many questions, then that suggests to me that you're not ready to do it in the time and you need to take longer to practise.
If you want more hands-on practice with this and for me to guide you then I'd urge you to join IELTS Champions Club – follow the link below for more information.