I often talk about the "keyword technique" in my reading lessons. But the "keyword technique" isn't special; it's just a convenient name that I use. Here's what I mean when I use this name:
Note: The main point of the "keyword technique" is that you have some specific words to look for in the passage. But remember: Locating the answer is just the first step. The second step is reading carefully, making sure you understand what you are reading, and comparing with the question.
To see me use the "keyword technique" in a quick video lesson, click here.
A few people have asked me to look at some examples from the General reading test. Try the exercise below; I'm sure you'll see that it's basically the same as Academic reading, just easier.
Read the following information about some medicine.
(Source: Cambridge IELTS book 3)
Do the following statements agree with the information above? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.
Note:
What were the 'keywords' that gave you the answers?
Students often ask me this: Is it possible to match paragraph headings to the correct paragraphs by reading the first sentence of the paragraph only?
My answer is: sometimes. The problem is that this 'technique' doesn't always work. For example, try the following exercise.
Choose the best heading (1 or 2) for the paragraph below. Which sentence gave you the answer?
It was once assumed that improvements in telecommunications would lead to more dispersal in the population as people were no longer forced into cities. However, the ISTP team's research demonstrates that the population and job density of cities rose or remained constant in the 1980s after decades of decline. The explanation for this seems to be that it is valuable to place people working in related fields together. 'The new world will largely depend on human creativity, and creativity flourishes where people come together face-to-face.'
(Source: Cambridge IELTS 6, test 2)
I've said before that IELTS Reading is a vocabulary test. If you don't understand the words that you read in the questions or passage, you probably won't get the right answer. Here's an example from one of my video lessons:
Is the following statement true, false or not given?
Some sewage networks built by the Romans in the UK were made out of wood.
Relevant part of the passage:
Roman towns and garrisons in the United Kingdom between 46 BC and 400 AD had complex sewer networks sometimes constructed out of hollowed-out elm logs.
Tasks:
- What answer would you give (T, F or NG)?
- Which 'keywords' would you underline in the question and passage?
- Which words do you need to understand in order to get the answer?
I recently spoke to a student who was completely new to the IELTS test. He had never tried or even seen an IELTS reading test before, and he asked me how and where to begin. My advice to the student was this: start by doing a 'general' IELTS reading test.
There are three reasons why I tell new students to start with the general test:
Today I'm attaching a reading exercise that requires you to match names with statements. For this type of question, I'm going to recommend 3 things that contradict my normal advice:
Try following these 3 steps to do the exercise attached below.
IELTS students often say that "not having enough time" is their biggest problem in the reading test. But is time really the problem?
Try this experiment to find out how time is affecting you:
1) Normal speed
Give yourself one hour to do a full reading test (from one of the Cambridge books). Or just take one passage and do that in 20 minutes. How many correct answers did you get?
2) Too fast
Give yourself just 30 minutes to do a full reading test, or only 10 minutes to do one passage. Use skimming, scanning, guessing, or any other 'trick' to get through all of the questions. This goes against my normal advice, but it's fine for this experiment.
3) Too slow
Give yourself 2 hours to do a full reading test, or 40 minutes to do one passage. Read everything slowly and carefully, and aim for a perfect score!
Results:
What happened when you performed this experiment? What scores did you get at normal, fast and slow speeds? Was time really the big problem, or did the experiment highlight any other difficulties?
People often ask about extra reading practice: Is it a good idea to read newspapers or magazines, and which ones are the best for IELTS practice?
Two good places to find articles are The Economist and National Geographic. Try to spend a few minutes every day reading something from one of these sites. Make a note of some new words or phrases, and gradually your reading will improve.
The people who write the questions for IELTS reading do something like this:
Have you ever tried writing your own IELTS reading questions? It's a good exercise to get you thinking like the question writer, and hopefully you'll see why the keyword technique is so useful.
Tip: If you try this, start by writing your own 'true, false, not given' questions.
There are various different ways to read a text. If you're just gathering information, you might scan several articles or books quickly; perhaps you might choose to quickly skim the beginning and end of an article if you only need to get a general idea of what it's about. When surfing the Internet, we skim, scan, click on hyperlinks, and jump around reading bits of text from here and there.
However, if your aim is to learn a new language, you'll need to slow down and do some 'deep' reading.
Here are some deep reading tips:
It's fine to do quick, 'superficial' reading too, but you should consider adding at least 15 minutes of focused, deliberate 'deep' reading to your daily study schedule.
When practising with the Cambridge IELTS books, try this study technique:
1. Choose a reading passage.
2. Go to the back of the book and get the correct answers.
3. Study the passage with the aim of proving why those answers are correct.
4. Make a keyword table.
When you know what the answers are, you can focus on exam technique: searching for keywords, then reading the relevant part of the passage carefully. You might find this helps you more than simply testing yourself would.
I usually write something about New Year's resolutions on January 1st, so here's some useful advice from a recent article on the Psychology Today website:
...
How to Keep Your New Year's Resolutions
While New Year’s resolutions are popular – about 40 percent of people make them, according to one source – few people actually succeed at keeping their resolutions. Researchers were able to draw some conclusions about why some people are successful at keeping resolutions, while others aren’t.
The most important factor in predicting success was self-efficacy – the belief in one's ability to get the job done. That likely means that you have spent some time thinking about and planning how to achieve your resolution, and also whether your resolution is realistic.
There is one other important note: Researchers found that people who were successful at keeping their New Year’s resolutions slipped, or made mistakes. In fact, 71 percent of people who were successful in their resolutions slipped in the first month. Interestingly, people who were not successful slipped at the same rate. But the people who were successful didn’t quit after making a mistake. And in many cases, they doubled their efforts after the slip. This demonstrates that persistence is also key.
...
Note:
In short, the advice is to think about your goals, believe that you can achieve them, and keep trying, even if you slip or make a mistake. Good advice for IELTS preparation.
Happy New Year!
It's frustrating to see students who rely on textbooks to teach them everything about the English language. Why read an article in an 'upper intermediate' textbook (that was probably written 10 years ago) when you could be reading 'real' articles in newspapers or on the Internet?
Read articles because you find them interesting, not because they have been written to demonstrate a particular grammar point.
A suggestion: if you've read anything interesting recently, put a link to it (and maybe a quick summary if you have time) in the comments area below this lesson.
IELTS reading is really a test of 2 things:
Finding
You need to be able to find the right part of the text quickly. I practise this a lot with my students: we decide which words in the question we need to search for, then we try to locate those words (or words with the same meaning) in the text.
Understanding
When you have found where the answer is, you need to read that part of the text carefully. Read the sentences before and after the keywords that you found. Then it becomes a test of your vocabulary knowledge: if you don't understand the words that you are reading, it will be difficult to get the right answer.
Whenever you read something in English, it's a good idea to write useful vocabulary in a notebook. But don't just write individual words, write the related words too. For example, do you know which verb is usually used with the noun "commitment"?
As an example, read the following short text:
A New Year’s resolution is a commitment that an individual makes to a personal goal, project, or the reforming of a habit in the coming year. Some examples include resolutions to lose weight, learn something new, or give up a habit such as smoking.
Recent research shows that while 52% of participants in a resolution study were confident of success with their goals, only 12% actually achieved their goals. A separate study in 2007 at the University of Bristol showed that 78% of those who set New Year’s resolutions fail.
Men achieved their goal 22% more often when they engaged in goal setting, a system where small measurable goals are set, while women succeeded 10% more when they made their goals public and got support from their friends.
Here is some key vocabulary from the text:
Remember: understanding the meaning of a word is not the same as being able to use it correctly.
Here's another keyword table, showing vocabulary from the three most recent reading lessons here on the blog.
Note:
Did you notice that the word "weed" appears twice in this table? In the first row of the table, "weed" is a noun, but in the sixth row it becomes part of the phrasal verb "weed out", which means "eliminate" or "remove".
As I'm sure you know, reading also benefits your writing. As an example, let's look at an article that discusses the 'homework' topic that we've been working on in recent writing lessons here on the blog.
Click here to read the article.
Here are some sentences using vocabulary from the passage. Can you fill the gaps that I've left?
*These expressions are a little informal.
There is a difference between the types of articles used in the academic and general reading tests. However, the types of questions and the techniques for answering them are the same. For this reason, I recommend using both types of exam paper for practice.
The main technique for finding answers in both reading tests is the 'keyword' technique: search in the passage for the key words in each question.
Here's a table of keywords from the GT test in Cambridge book 6, page 118:
A student asked me about the 'yes, no, not given' question below.
Question statement:
Thirty per cent of deaths in the United States are caused by smoking-related diseases.
Relevant part of the passage:
Smoking, it is believed, is responsible for 30 per cent of all deaths from cancer and clearly represents the most important preventable cause of cancer in countries like the United States today.
(Click here to see the full passage and exercise)
The official correct answer to this question is 'no'. However, the student who asked me about this question believes that we should answer 'not given'. His reason for this is that we have no information about deaths that aren't caused by cancer. Maybe smoking does cause 30% of all deaths.
What do you think? Is this student 'overthinking'? How can we explain why 'no' is the correct answer?