IELTS and newspapers

This lesson is about using newspapers to improve your English for IELTS. What you will find are some online resources and basic tips on using newspapers, an explanation of how reading newspapers can help you in IELTS and then suggest a few exercises to help you read better.

Why read newspapers?  You need the same reading skills as the test

Many newspaper articles are very similar to IELTS texts. Generally, they are around the same length, they cover the same general interest topics and they are written for non-specialist readers. You normally read a newspaper article quickly to see if it is interesting or not? That’s the way they work. This is very much the same skill as you need in the exam when you skim the text first for general meaning.

Very frequently, you already know something about what you are reading, so you look to see if there is anything in the article about that. This is also very similar to the exam when you scan the text to find certain information.

Unless you are a native speaker, newspaper articles will contain plenty of unknown words. The idea is that you keep reading just as you would in the exam and try and understand meaning from context. If you look up every word in your dictionary, then you stop reading.

Why read newspapers? It’s the efficient way to learn vocabulary

A key idea is that we learn words by using them and that reading a word is a way of using it. This means that every time you see a word when you read, you are learning a bit about it. Very often you are learning the really tough things such as which other words it is used with. This can often be much more efficient than just keeping a vocabulary notebook or trying to learn lists of words. Where do we see most words? When we read.

Why read newspapers? It gives you a break from IELTS

Too much IELTS is not good for the soul – and may not be the best thing for your English. If you want to improve your English, it does help to do things that you find interesting and IELTS is not always that interesting. The more you are interested, the better your brain works and the better your brain works, the better you will learn. Newspapers can work here because they contain something for everyone from business, to arts and sport. One idea is just to read the things that interest you.

The difficulty with newspapers – and how to deal with it

They are written for native speakers. This means that they are hard. Here is what I suggest:

• find topics that genuinely interest you – that way you will be motivated to keep reading
• read for general meaning – every time you finish an article and understand what it was about, feel good about yourself. You have just completed a native speaker language task
• read regularly and for shortish periods of time – an exam reading takes 20 minutes

The best exercise of all – just read

Below I suggest some specific “learning” exercises. They all work I believe. But the very best thing you can do is just read – read as much as you can, as often as you can. Why? The people who read best, read most. I’d also add that this type of  reading is good training for IELTS – long texts with unknown words won’t scare you.

Exercise one – what was it about?

This is the world’s simplest exercise. I also happen to think that it is a good one. The idea is that when you finish reading the article, you say what it is about. If you can’t do that, then you haven’t read well enough – it may have been time wasted. This is the one exercise I suggest you do every time.

Exercise two – make notes and write a summary

This is a similar exercise, but one you will probably do less often. The idea this time is that you make notes of the main points as you read. Then at the end you write a short summary. Here is why it can be a good idea:

• making notes helps you focus on words – that’s good for learning vocabulary
• writing the summary tests how well you understand how to use the words – can you put it into a sentence? If not, you haven’t really learned the word yet
• if you look at this reading lesson, you will see that I very strongly suggest that it helps to make notes as you read an IELTS passage. This is the same skill.
• IELTS writing task one is really just a summary writing exercise. People get confused by the pictures and numbers. The skills you use here in writing a summary  - picking out the main points and summarising them – are exactly the same skills as task one.

 Exercise three – find another similar article

This I think is a great exercise. Entirely natural, interesting and good for language learning. The idea is that once you have read one article, you try and find another similar article. As you probably do in life. This is normally just a case of Googling the headline: most newspapers carry very similar stories. What I suggest you do next is look for what is similar and what is different . This is really going to be an IELTS scanning activity. you are not necessarily looking for the same words, but the same meaning. To see how this can work, try looking at these articles:

I found these by looking for “The best place to live in Britain”. They all contain similar language and ideas, but are slightly different.

Exercise four – find 5 words

This is the least natural exercise here. The idea is to work on your vocabulary – and think about how dictionaries can help you. You read a text and choose 5 words from it that you want to learn. Here are some ideas about how you can make this work:

• don’t choose too many words – you’ll get them confused
• aim for common words or words you already half recognise. These are most important words as they are the ones you will wan to use. To find out how common they are, look in the Macmillan Online Dictionary – the red words are the ones you want most
• look for the words they are used with. Is there a preposition (by, with, to etc) following it? If it’s a noun is there an adjective with it?
• look in the dictionary again to see what other phrases are used with that word
• now try and re-tell the story you have just read, using those words. At some stage, you do want to try and use that word yourself

Newspaper sites

Which newspapers should you read? The ones you enjoy reading. This may mean that the best newspaper is an English language newspaper based in your country. It can be hard to read English/Australian/Canadian newspapers because they are about foreign cultures. Here are a few suggestions of where to start:

Ten top tools to do Academic reading successfully

It’s a download from D.Colls Blog.

For many academic IELTS candidates reading is the hardest paper and the one which requires most training. Here I suggest some different ways to make that training as efficient as possible. These pieces of advice are fairly general and are designed to help you think about the best way to train yourself in IELTS reading and how to avoid some common mistakes.

1. Beat the fear – read as much as possible

My first suggestion is to read as much as possible. By this I don’t mean do endless IELTS practice tests, I mean do as much general reading as possible. I suggest you focus on reading short articles on topics that interest you or on topics that are common in IELTS – newspapers and magazines are a great resource here.

One reason why this is such a good idea is that many candidates freeze in the reading believing it is too hard and so fail to get their band score. If, however, you read enough “native English” before the exam, you will become more and more confident in looking at texts where you don’t understand every word. Confidence is a very important concept in IELTS.

If you look at Daily Exercises, you will find lots of possible exercises for you. The idea is to find something that interests you and read. That’s all.

2. Improve key skills – skimming and scanning and reading in detail

A major problem in the exam is the length of the texts and you will not have time to read them all carefully. You need to train your speed reading skills so that you can read as efficiently as possible. 2 skills here are skimming which is reading quickly for general meaning and scanning which is looking for specific information.

You may sometimes see advice saying that you don’t need to read in detail. Incorrect. Bad advice. You shouldn’t read the whole text in detail but you will need to parts of the text in detail – if you want to get the right answer. Put simply, skimming and scanning are useful skills to help show you where the answer might be: reading in detail tells you what the answer is.

You might want to look at this post on improving your reading speed.

3. Time management – experiment to see what works

Because the texts are so long you need to have a definite strategy for how you manage your time in the exam to make sure you finish on time. This means deciding:

• how long you look at the text before answering questions
• how long you spend on each question
• how long you spend on each group of questions
• how long you spend on each text
• do you leave time at the end to go back at look at unanswered questions?

There is a lot to consider here. You will find books and websites that insist you do it their way. They may claim to have a magic formula and that you must do this or you must do that. Ignore them. Their advice may be good for some people but not for you.

The key point here is that different learners have different styles and different needs. Much the best advice here is to experiment and try different approaches and see what works best for you.

Focus on the question – avoid careless errors

The texts in IELTS are typically quite hard, so candidates spend as much time as possible reading the texts. Mistake. Why? Well, a huge amount of mistakes are made by not focussing enough on the exact question. It can be easy if you are in a hurry to miss a word such as “always” or “often”: the problem is those sorts of words can change the meaning of questions.

There is an easy solution to this problem: it is to go back and look at the question before you write in the answer. Make sure that the question says what you think it says. You will normally save yourself 2/3 marks this way.

5. Learn the exam – know the different types of questions

There are 8/9 different types of reading question that examiners may use. Before the exam, you should make yourself familiar with each type of question as they are slightly different. What I suggest is that you look at my series of tutorials on the different types of reading questions as a first step to see what the question types are. The next stage is to experiment and see what techniques you are going to use for each type of question.

This may mean that you approach different types of questions differently.

6. Train yourself, don’t test yourself

One common mistake candidates make is to practise exam questions too much. Exam practice is important to learn the timing (3 above) and learn the question types (5 above), but that does not mean that every time you practise reading you need to do it in exam conditions. My suggestion is that you do some “open book” tests where you can see the answers as you do the questions. This way you will learn how examiners set questions and how to find the answers. If you just test yourself, this may not happen. How often and when you do this training will depend on your preparation programme.

7. Learn how to underline

This is a very specific piece of advice. You may believe it is wrong to write in books and generally I’d agree with you, but IELTS is different. A very strong suggestion is that you should underline words in the text in the exam. There are at least two reasons for this:

1. if you underline key words in the text, it can help you organise the text and this will save you time in the exam
2. if you find an answer, it is sensible to underline the part of the passage that relates to the question as a check (see 4 above) and to write the number of the question next to it in case you find a better answer later

How you do this will depend on you and your style. Some people underline different types of words in different ways.I’d only add that less is more: if you underline too much, it can become confusing.

8. Beware word matching – be careful with key words

One very common mistake is to match a word in the question with a word in the text and to think you have found your answer. It is almost never that simple and I am tempted to say that if the words do match, then that is not your answer. What you are normally looking for are either synonyms (words with a similar meaning) or paraphrases (short bits of text that say the same as the question.

One reason candidates make this mistake is that teachers (myself included) tend to say look for key words in the question. This is helpful advice to show you where the answer might be and which paragraph it might be in. After that you need to go back and read the whole question carefully to see what the answer is.

Focus on the question – avoid careless errors

The texts in IELTS are typically quite hard, so candidates spend as much time as possible reading the texts. Mistake. Why? Well, a huge amount of mistakes are made by not focussing enough on the exact question. It can be easy if you are in a hurry to miss a word such as “always” or “often”: the problem is those sorts of words can change the meaning of questions.

There is an easy solution to this problem: it is to go back and look at the question before you write in the answer. Make sure that the question says what you think it says. You will normally save yourself 2/3 marks this way.

9. The questions follow the text – normally

This is a very practical piece of advice and could save you a lot of wasted time. Typically, the questions will come in the order of the text: so the answer to question 3 will come after the answer to question 2. This can be very helpful in the exam if you are a quick worker who goes through the questions once for the easy ones and then a second time for the harder ones. If you have answer 4 underlined (see 7 above) and answer 6 underlined then you know where answer 5 must come.

One word of warning. In certain types of question (eg paragraph matching) the order of the questions are jumbled.

 

10. The questions or the text – which do you read first

There is no one right answer here.

Text books tend to advise you to read the text quickly first so that you know how the text is organised. This helps as you will save time later by knowing which paragraph will contain the answer. This can be a good approach, particularly for high level candidates provided you don’t spend too much reading and you have notes/underlinings afterwards.

Many teachers say that you should read the questions first and not read the whole passage. There is logic here too. Normally, you do not have to understand the meaning of the whole passage to answer the questions, so why waste time reading it? This approach can work, especially for lower level candidates who might not understand too much of the passage anyway.

However, thee is always a third way. Life is not black and white. It is quite possible to decide to use different strategies for certain question types. In paragraph matching you are going to have to read the whole passage, so you might decide to read first then. In the short answer questions, you might decide you look at the questions first. As ever, you decide.

The only bad piece of advice is the one that tells you you must do it their way. Ignore them. The only right way is the way that works.

11. Fill out the answer sheet

Okay, this is an eleventh tip. Practise filling out the answer sheet before you get to the exam. Too many  avoidable mistakes are made this way. I’d go further: whenever you practise IELTS reading, use an answer sheet. This is what I do with my classes. Two points:

1. when you go through the answers in your practice book, make sure that you have written the answer exactly as it is in the book – anything else will lose you the point
2. you need to fill out your answers in the 60 minutes. They don’t give you any more time.