IELTS Reading: if you're stuck, diagnose the problem

October 16, 2017

IELTS Reading: if you're stuck, diagnose the problem

This week a student asked me for help with a common problem: what can you do if you keep getting the same score (for example 6.5)? Maybe you've followed my advice, tried all of the techniques, and done lots of practice, but nothing seems to work. You're stuck!

Before you can solve a problem, you need to diagnose what the problem is. Here are some steps that you could take to do this with regard to IELTS reading:

1. Get a copy of one of the Cambridge IELTS books, ideally the newest one.
2. Do the first reading test in the book in one hour, like a real exam.
3. Check your answers with the correct answers at the back of the book.

Now comes the important part.

4. Analyse the mistakes that you made very carefully, and ask yourself the following questions:

Did you lose marks because you ran out of time or had to rush?
Were there any answers that you had trouble finding?
Were there any vocabulary problems i.e. key words that you didn't understand?
Did any of your mistakes surprise you? In other words, were there any answers that turned out to be wrong, even though you were very confident that they were right?

The aim of the four questions above is to diagnose whether your reading problems are related to time, finding answers, understanding vocabulary, or confusion between answers.

You might need to do several tests and a lot of careful analysis of your mistakes to really find out what's going wrong. But then you'll know what to work on.