Unit 21: Mistakes when practicing IELTS Reading to avoid

As you know, Reading is a skill that is not too difficult to achieve a high score in the IELTS exam. However, that is not why we consider Reading an easy and subjective skill because if there are some students who work very hard, practice a lot of questions, however, the exam preparation efficiency has not reached the highest level because there are Maybe you made some mistakes while practicing this skill. Here IELTS Fighter shows you how to help.

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The first is to FIND ALL of the words in the article Reading.

Maybe this mistake is not made by many people, but it is an “everlasting” mistake of candidates when they first study for IELTS. IELTS readings are extracted from scientific articles on real life topics and use a huge amount of specialized words. Looking up the dictionary for all or most of the words is impossible as well as very time consuming and can’t be solved. You will do well.

=> Tip: During the review process, you should only look up words that are considered key in the lesson, that is, words that if you don’t look them up, you can’t understand opinions, feelings, attitudes (favorites, disparaging, criticizing, neutral) of the writer.

Example: “When a nucleus of one of these elements is struck by a free neutron, it breaks down into lighter nuclei which fly apart at high speed, coliding with surrounding atoms”. With this sentence, you probably don’t need to look up the words “nucleus” or “nuclei” or “neutron”, but the sentence will be very difficult to understand without important words like “struck”, “colliding with”, “surrounding” “. So what are the important words? Important words are words that when you cover them up, it’s almost impossible to understand what the sentence is about.

This is a fairly easy sentence to understand and doesn’t include too many confusing technical terms, so you probably won’t have much trouble with this sentence. However, with more difficult sentences, including longer words, you should also do it your way, that is, after you are done, only look up the important words to help you understand the meaning of the whole sentence.

The second is to try to understand the entire content of the text.

A task in Reading will be relatively long, and with 20 minutes of work on each task, understanding the entire content of the task is not necessary. Maybe we will get the first few sentences right, but IELTS needs speed, if we read it carefully to understand it all, we may have to leave it blank (or circle around) a lot because we don’t have time.

=> Tip: Skim the entire article to both grasp the main idea of the text and locate what information is in which paragraph. Then read the question to see what it is asking us and then identify the “region” in which the information is “staying”.

Third, the ability to paraphrase is not good.

Paraphrasing is an extremely important skill in both Listening and Reading. Sometimes the question is not difficult, but it is the test that is challenging the candidate’s ability to understand in many directions.

For example, “rotate” can be replaced with “move around”, or the whole sentence is paraphrased.

For example, “There is no point in taking extra classes” could be replaced with “People see few advantages in taking classes after school”. Candidates should read more to understand the paraphrase, making it easier to understand the questions and choose the answer.

Fourth is spending too much time on one question

This is a problem that many IELTS learners have. With each difficult question, it is inevitable to spend a lot of time on that question. However, each question has an equal score, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time on a question you’re stuck with.

Remember that you should only spend a maximum of a minute and a half on each question. If you do not have an answer, then mark it so that after completing the entire passage you can easily check it again and find the answer.

5. Answer the question before reading the passage

Please note, this is a habit that should be avoided when doing IELTS reading. Maybe you are very knowledgeable about the topic of music and when you read an article about music, you often answer the questions first and tend to skip reading the text to find the answers to those questions.

This is a mistake because the IELTS test tests your language ability, not your knowledge, so you NEED to read the text before answering the question, not just rely on your background knowledge to answer. Answer those questions because the possibility of being wrong will be very high!

Just come here for today. IELTS Fighter will continue to make common mistakes in Writing and the rest of the skills. Happy learning everyone!

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