- Hi everyone, it's Michelle here from IELTS Advantage.
Today, we're gonna be talking
about how you can increase your reading speed.
Now, the IELTS Reading test isn't easy.
You've only got 60 minutes to answer 40 questions.
And if you can read faster,
it's obviously going to make this a lot easier.
Now everybody knows this, and so often the advice
that students are given is that what you need to do
to read faster is skim and scan.
Now, skimming is part of the strategy
that you'll use to answer the different question types,
but in itself, it's not enough to get the correct answer.
So, we're not gonna focus on skimming today.
What I'm going to show you is a strategy that you can use
to increase your reading speed so that once you know sort of
where the answer, the correct answer might and might not be
in the text, you can read carefully to find that answer,
but you can read a little bit faster.
So that's what we're gonna focus on today.
And at the end of the video, I'm going to give you a task
that you can use to practice with.
All right, so, how do you read faster
and why should you not rely on skimming?
Well, the research varies, but a lot of researchers
believe that in order to actually skim a text,
you need to know anywhere between 95 and 98% of the words
in order to skim, and most students don't know
that percentage of words in an IELTS test.
I mean, think about it this way, right?
The IELTS test is one test,
and it has to be hard enough to determine
whether or not somebody is a Band 7
or a Band 8 or a band 9.
So if you're a Band 8, you'll get some questions wrong,
but if you're a Band 9, you won't.
And the reason students get questions wrong
on the reading test is usually because of vocabulary.
So, if you're sort of at an intermediate
or upper intermediate or even advanced C1 level of English,
there will be words in the test,
in the reading test that you don't know.
So, the number one thing that you can do
to improve your reading score
is to increase your vocabulary.
And we've got some great resources
that Chris has put together on our YouTube page
to help you improve your vocabulary.
If you improve your vocabulary,
it will make it a lot easier to skim,
but skimming is still not enough to find the correct answer.
What you need to do to find the correct answer
is very close reading.
Now, what I'm gonna show you is how you can get faster
at this close reading.
So again, how you get faster at skimming
is improving your vocabulary.
So here's how I know that you need to know
a lot of words in order to be able to skim.
This is a book that I read recently,
it's called "This Is Going to Hurt",
it's written by a man called Adam Kay.
He was a doctor in the hospitals here in the UK
and in the NHS, and he wrote a memoir, and it's quite funny.
Well, it's sad, but also quite funny.
And, I read this book quite quickly,
so there's about this many words on the page.
I could probably just reading a page in less than a minute
'cause I'm a pretty quick reader.
But here's what I noticed about this book in particular.
I was reading, reading along,
and then I'd get to a word like this one
which you probably can't see.
But it's got a little asterisk by it,
which means that he's had to explain it.
Now, because he's talking about his job working
as a doctor, there's a lot of medical terminology
that I don't know.
Now a lot of our VIP students are medical professionals,
they might know these words.
I don't know these words.
Some of you watching might be medical professionals,
and you might know these words as well, but I don't.
So whenever I came to one of these words,
it's like somebody had hit the breaks.
I didn't know it, I didn't know how to sound it out,
I didn't know how to pronounce it.
I'd have to then go and read what it meant,
and then I'd have to come back,
remember sort of what he was talking about,
and then carry on reading.
So this, every time I ran into a word
that I didn't know like this,
it really really slowed me down.
Now, if this was full of words like that,
there's no way I could skim this text
because I just wouldn't know enough of the words.
As it goes, I can skim it here,
and I can sort of run my eyes over the text,
and there's enough words that I recognize,
I could tell you roughly what it's about.
But then remember to get the right answer
for the reading test,
you need to do a close reading.
Now, if I came to one of those words
in the close reading, it would still slow me down,
and I might get the answer wrong if I don't know the words.
So again, improving your vocabulary
is the most important thing
that you can do to increase your reading score.
But, how can you just start to read faster?
You know, how can you pick up a book like this
and read a page in less than a minute
and understand 99% of it when you know enough vocabulary?
Well, here is one idea, okay?
So, when you're reading to really understand,
you should be reading at about 200 to 230 words a minute.
Skimming, by the way, is about 700 words a minute.
So, a lot of students and a lot of people in generally,
they read like this, they put their finger
under the word and they move their finger along word
by word, and they don't say the words out loud,
but they say them silently in their head.
This process is called sub-vocalization.
And basically what it does is it limits your reading speed
to the speed that you would read
if you were reading out loud.
Now you can try this in your first language,
and I bet that if you read out loud,
you read a lot slower than if you read silently.
So, here's one way that you can sort of break the habit
of sub-vocalization.
So, people will read, they'll often get a piece of paper
or something and they'll put it under,
or their finger or something, they'll put it under the line.
So they'll start with here and it'll be okay,
Sunday, 17 October 2004, and then they'll move it down
and they'll be, to give myself a bit of credit,
I didn't panic when the patient I was reviewing on the board
unexpectedly started hosing enormous quantities of blood.
Ugh, yeah, you have to have a strong stomach
to read this book.
See, that's quite slow, now, isn't it?
And if you read this slowly,
it's gonna make it hard to answer
all the questions on the IELTS Reading test.
So here's what you can do.
Take your same piece of paper,
but don't put it under the words like this,
put it over the words so it comes down and it covers them.
So I'm still doing, my eyes are still going along
the lines like this, but what I'm doing
by moving this card down over the lines,
and I can choose to speed, right?
I could do it really quickly
or I could do it a little bit slower.
But what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to force my eyes
to move faster than my mouth
would be able to actually say the words.
So when I'm training my brain, it's to recognize
the words and to understand the words
without actually hearing the words in my head.
And if you can do that, you're really really
going to increase your reading speed.
Of course, if I was doing this myself
and I was moving the piece of paper down
over top of the words and I got to a word
that I didn't know and I kept going,
what I would do is I would make them guess
about what it was.
Okay, this is some kind of emergency,
this is some kind of medicine,
this is some kind of disease, right?
That's, 'cause I know the context
is probably one of these things,
and then I would keep going.
Now the more words I run into that I don't know,
of course the harder this is.
But I can still work on
increasing my reading speed that way.
So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you
a text.
It's about 350 words long, and I'm gonna show it to you
at 200 words a minute.
So remember I said if you are reading
for comprehension, right,
most people read at between 200 and 230 words a minute
for comprehension, this is the close reading
where you understand everything you are reading
so that you could then answer one
of the IELTS reading questions.
So what I want you to do is I want you just to try it, okay?
So I'm gonna put it up on the screen
and I want you, it's gonna,
the words are gonna flash one by one.
It's using a program called Speed Reader.
There's a free app and then there's also a paid version,
so we're gonna use the free, the free app.
So I'm gonna show you the text and then at the end,
what I would like you to do down below in the comments
is I'd like you to tell me what would be a good title
for this article?
It comes from a newspaper
and it comes from the Lifestyle section,
so it's not an academic or medical topic.
So, a title of an article gives the reader
some idea of what it's about.
It doesn't have to be witty or clever,
but just generally, what is it about?
If you can make a title,
that means you've understood enough of the article.
So, let us try it.
All right, everyone, here we go, let's begin.
All right, that was it.
Post your answers down below,
compare with what other students have written.
If you've kind of got you know more or less
the same kind of information, then that's great.
So with this app,
you can copy and paste any text from the internet,
and you can also vary the speed.
So you can slow it down a little bit if you need
or you can speed it up a bit
if you want to give yourself a challenge.
So you've got this tool online to use,
you've also got the technique
that I showed you about moving
a piece of paper down and covering
the words as you go.
Ideally, to do this practice, you would find a text
or a book where you knew almost all of the words.
If there is maybe one or two new words on the page
that you don't know, that's an ideal level.
So graded readers are great
for this if you have access to them,
or even just something that's easy.
So something that maybe you've read before
or something with a vocabulary that you're familiar with,
because then you can just focus on the speed
and you're not getting too tied up in too many new words.
So if you found this useful and you would like more advice
on how you can improve your IELTS score,
please subscribe to our YouTube page.
Bye everyone.
(upbeat uplifting music)