How To Improve My IELTS Score

Did you know that by mastering 6 basic skills and strategies you can obtain a high score in IELTS, even if you do not comprehend all words and expressions?

The skills and strategies listed below can help you overcome the challenge of answering questions relating to a paragraph you do not fully understand.

Tips

1. The importance of skimming

Skimming means reading a text very quickly to note down the most important points.

Mastering this ‘speed-reading’ technique will help you pick out the main points that the author is trying to get across. When skimming, move your eyes quickly over the sentences, ignore supporting sentences (e.g.quotations), and do not try to understand the specific meaning of each word in the text.

The whole point of ‘skimming’ text is to quickly get the gist and be able to locate the information you might need to answer questions.

It is recommended not to spend more than 5 minutes reading any passage in the test.

2. Text Structure

It is critical to understand how a passage is structured. That knowledge will help you to identify quickly where you can find specific information.

If you have an understanding where you can find the main argument of the text, where you can find a conclusion, how you can identify changes of opinion or changes of topic, you will gain a lot of time, otherwise spent reading the entirety of the passage.

To help you with this, it is recommended you underline or highlight keywords, possibly with an annotation in the margin.

3. Scanning

Once you have read your text, study the question carefully and look for certain keywords, names, dates, a cause, technical definitions, etc. that will help you pinpoint in the direction of the answer, and where the answer can be found in the text.

Once you have identified some of these, go back through the text, but without re-reading every word and sentence. Your skimming or speed-reading techniques will come in very useful.

You might want to start scanning the text from end to start to get a good result.

4. Studying conceptual words

It is recommended to have a broad vocabulary to obtain good results in the IELTS Reading test; however, vocabulary size is not decisive.

Most questions in the test will paraphrase the original text. Conceptual words, such as find/discover, avoid/prevent are most often paraphrased, but more technical names such as hard drive, earthquake, ecology will also be part of the text.

When studying vocabulary, concentrate on the conceptual words in a first instance (see Academic Word List).

5. Deriving meaning of a word from its context

The authors of the IELTS put effort into introducing many unusual words into a passage.

This will show them if the candidates have an in-depth knowledge of English vocabulary, but also if the candidates have the skills required to figure out the meaning of a word by analysing its context.

The contextual clues can be a definition, collocating words, or the general meaning of the sentence.

6. Manage your time effectively

For most universities, a score of 7.0 in the Academic Reading Module is good enough to obtain entry. By answering 30 out of the 40 questions, you will obtain that score.

Don’t spend too much time on the most difficult questions, it is better to allow yourself enough time to solve the 30 easier ones.

If you have time left at the end, go over the more difficult ones and review your answers.

If you are unsure of an answer it is recommended that you write down your best guess and don’t spend more than about 1 minute on each question.