IELTS Reading: Read faster & remember more

Oh, what a great book.

Thank you, Jessica Whitehead.

Are you doing an IELTS exam or will you be doing an IELTS exam in the future?

Special shoutout to Pedro, thank you for helping me on this, and rock your exam.

You're going to do it, boy.

If you're studying IELTS, there's one section in the test that is difficult.

They're all difficult, but it's the reading section.

So, when you're doing your test, you have to read the passage quickly, you have to get

all of the wonderful information, and then you have to answer the questions.

So, what I want to help you do is something really cool called speed reading.

When I was in grade 2, my teacher taught me something that was amazing.

Usually when you read something, you take your little finger and you read along like this.

So my teacher taught me at the young age of eight to get a bookmark, and instead of reading

each word, you're going to read one whole sentence with an eyescape.

So, instead of reading word by word with your little finger, you're going to put a bookmark

on the sentence and you're going to focus on the sentence.

This allows you to read something much faster.

So, put your little finger away and grab a bookmark or a piece of paper.

So, number six is: Use a bookmark.

It helps you absorb the information faster.

Another thing that you can do or not do is when you're reading: "The pizza was a wide

pizza with ham and pineapple.

It was the most exiting flavours, it was..."

Don't read out loud.

Two reasons: One, there're other people around you that you're probably disturbing, and there's

probably been a scientific study that if you move your lips, you're doing extra work and

you're kind of wasting time.

Try and close your mouth.

Don't: "Ra-ra-ra-ra" under your breath, don't move your lips.

Just absorb it and read it.

This helps you go through it faster and ultimately get that high score that you've all been looking for.

Another tip is to pay attention to important key words.

So, these are going to be things like dates and times, numbers, and proper nouns.

So, please tell me you know what a proper noun is.

A proper noun is a place or a person.

It starts with a capital letter.

So, one really, really good thing you can do is you can take your little highlighter

and circle the important words.

When you come back to the reading section or when you've read it, it sticks in your

brain more.

This is good for practicing, too.

Some articles and some things have special punctuation.

So, dashes.

Dashes are a little line here and a little line at the end.

There's a very, very good reason why they've used dashes, and that is they're telling you

that this information is really important.

It's giving you something extra or something that changes the idea about the sentence.

So, the information between dashes or even between commas is put there for a reason,

and it's probably got some wealth of information, maybe the answer to question number seven.

Some readings that you have not necessarily on IELTS, but a newspaper if you're reading

something for fun...

Do people read for...?

Yeah, they do read for fun, Ronnie. Okay.

Is a special font.

So, if the words are bold which means they're bigger; or if they're written in italics which

means, like, handwriting; or if the words are underlined - this is going to give you

some really strong information that it's important because they made it like this.

When you first begin your IELTS test in the reading section, always read the questions

first, then you'll know what information you're looking for.

If you just read it willy-nilly without thinking

about the questions, you've wasted a lot of time.

So read the questions first, then go back and get the information that you need.

And about paragraphs, this is a tricky thing that they do.

I want you to read the first sentence, it's called the topic sentence.

The topic sentence has...

We'll say "the meat" or the importance of the paragraph.

Maybe in the middle of the paragraph they've got some information and it's useless, really,

because maybe the idea has changed.

So, the best thing you can do is read the first topic sentence, skim the rest of it,

and concentrate on the last, because maybe the idea has changed halfway through the sentence.

If you're going for your IELTS, good luck.

It's hard, but you can do it.

For more IELTS tips, stay tuned. Bye-bye.