IELTS Reading: why isn't my score improving?

A student emailed me the other day, asking me to explain why his reading score was stuck at 5.5.

I had never met the student, so I could only offer general advice. Here's what I wrote in my response to his email:

The first step towards making an improvement is to understand what you're doing wrong. So, you need to analyse what's happening when you do reading tests. Here are some questions that you could ask yourself:

• Do you finish all 40 questions?
• Do you find one type of question very difficult?
• Are you reading too slowly, or maybe too quickly?
• Are you following all of the advice that I gave in this lesson?
• Are you doing realistic practice tests using the Cambridge books?
• What scores do you get when you do practice tests?
• What problems do you notice when you do practice tests?

Try to work out what is going wrong, and then I'll be able to give you better advice.

Comments

[Behnaz]

Hi, Actually I could not pass from the complicated words, I have to read them correctly then pass, and in the middle of reading, I distracted just because of reading some of them incorrectly. Also, I have to read more than 3 times a sentence to understand that, because the sentences are too long and include many hard words. In addition, all Cambridge books are repetitive for me I did all of them before.

[gabi]

Behnaz

Might I suggest you have your own reading program, as maybe you need to read more widely, and acquire more vocabulary. There is no quick fix if you are struggling with hard words and long sentences, so it will take months of hard work to improve your result. However, it should also improve your writing.

I would suggest you read an article from this site every day:

https://www.theguardian.com/world

There are sections on this site for science, technology, global development, the environment, and cites, all of which are relevant to IELTS.

You should also be listening to "TED talks" so that your pronunciation of new words is correct.

[Pachu]

Sir, my score is same, I couldn't increase the score in reading.In practice test or real exam , I can't finish all 40 questions.Time is not sufficient to do them .I find some types of questions are difficult and time consuming such as which paragraph contains information, paragraph heading and sometimes MCQ of more than 3 or 4 options.I read the passage at normal speed but when time is short then I read a bit fast .May be my normal speed can be slow .Sir, can you define the normal speed ? It depends upon person to person.Yes,I am following the advice that you have given us.Firstly I do the questions which are in passage order and then move to list of heading and which paragraph contains the information.With regards to practice test, I only do Cambridge practice test as they know the level of difficulty which students have to perform in real exam.I score most of the time during practice session is 23.During practice session, I find it takes more time than 1 minute for each question because of not finding the location and recognizing the answer immediately.Sir, would you suggest me how to improve my reading score as I am very worried about it.

[Trisha]

I can finish all 40 questions but when doing the last section I usually feel anxious because I am afraid of I cannot finish them all.So the score on my final article is lower than the other two articles, floating between 5-6 points.I think this is the reason why I cannot get 7-7.5 on reading.

Also, I usually read all the questions on each section before I read the article,that costs me about 3 minutes.Because I have to understand what the questions are talking about and find the difference between each options,is someone do the reading as same as me? Or have some better reading methods to share?

Anyway, I think the reading part on IELTS does have some skills to follow and ofcourse, vocabulary is number one.

[Shohjahon]

Trisha
I don't think you should read all the questions in a section first,that is definitely time consuming
Why don't you try reading the 1st question and find the answer for it and then read the 2nd question. This works well for me. If you find a question too difficult, just miss it,
When you think about it, the difficulty levels of 3passages are different(easy,medium,the hardest)
You don't have to spend exactly 20 minutes for each section, it is possible to finish the "easya and medium passages" in about 30minutes , as you see you will have plenty of time for the last passage
Another method is to read the titles of passages so you can begin with the one you think is easy for you

[Trisha]

Shohjahon,

Actually I tried this method before, if the first section of questions are paragraph heading,paragraph contains information then it did not work well on me.Because the answers of these questions hiding in the whole passage,if you spend too much time finding the answers,you may miss the detailed questions on section 2 or 3.

Another method is to read the titles of passages so you can begin with the one you think is easy for you. I believe this is a good way to estimate the difficulty of passages.Thank you very much.

[zoe]

Trisha

There is only time to read the passage once. With paragraph heading questions, I read the first paragraph and write down the heading letter, next to it, and an alternative if I am at all unsure. Then move on to the next paragraph, and so on. At the end, if necessary, check where you have the same answer twice.

[Hana]

Hi Sir! I have enough time to finish the questions and I am able to spot the related information from the paragraph. However, even though I spot that correctly, I always get a wrong answer, especially in the true/false part. I am currently practicing through https://ieltsonlinetests.com/ielts-exam-library#academic but I am not sure if the tests are realistic practices.