Reading skills for students preparing for
the academic version of IELTS
Sam McCarter
Questions
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Are there any stock formats/processes for the structure,
content and format of IELTS questions in relation to their
READING texts?
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• Do these formats suggest and common core strategies
that can be imparted to students in terms of exam
strategies to work on prior to an assessment?
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• How has this influenced the content of his books and
publications?
‘Meaning-focused Output
Reading should be related to other language
skills.
(Nation, I.S.P. 2009. Teaching ESL/ EFL
Reading and Writing. New York. Routledge.)
Types of passages
Exposition/ Argumentation/ Historical biographical
Text/ Essential features
• Time relationships
• Problem and solution
• Cause and effect
• Classification
• Comparison and contrast
• Argument
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Description- processes/ sequencing
Narrative
Instruction
Definition
Explanation
Exemplification
Generalization and specificity
Drawing conclusions
Rhetorical organisation
(Weir, C et al. 2009. The relationship between academic
reading construct as measured by IELTS and the
reading experiences of students in their first year of
study at a British university. IELTS Research Reports 9:
109.)
Filters
Themes: Science, the Arts, Psychology
Types of passages: Exposition/ Argumentation/ Problem- solution
Perspectives: scientific, technological, engineering, mathematical,
social, educational, financial, economic. medical
Functions/ Essential elements: Cause and effect/ classification
Phrases
Words
The skills that students need to navigate IELTS reading
passages efficiently
-prediction
-skimming
-scanning
-distinguishing between:
-factual and non-factual information
-important and less important items
-relevant and irrelevant information
-explicit and implicit information
-ideas examples and opinions
-drawing inferences and conclusions
-deducing unknown words
-understanding graphic presentation (data, diagrams, etc.)
-understanding text organisation and linguistic/ semantic
aspects,
e.g. relationships between and within sentences (e.g.
cohesion)
-recognising discourse/ semantic markers and their
function
(Jordan, R.R. 1997. English for Academic Purposes: A
guide and
resource book for teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.)
Implications
• Length of the texts
• Complexity of discourse?
• Systematic approach to text, question type and skills
Topics- (unlimited?) vs. organization (range finite?)
• Teacher/ student interest
• The level of the students
Skills/ knowledge balance
• Students’ reading habits
Types of Reading Questions
• Global vs. Discrete
Approaches
• Top-down approach
• Bottom-up approach
• Interactive Approach
‘...there are few adherents to the strong form of either
polar approach.’
(Hudson, T. D. 2007. Teaching Second Language
Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.)
Learning navigation skills
• Switching reading ‘gears’
Studying/ close reading/ learning/ testing/ leisure
• Learning what not to read/ look at
• Noticing/ recognizing function/ language
• Noticing the function of tenses
• Tense sequencing/ modal verbs/
• Awareness of nominalization vs. denominalization
Noun phrases
Headings
• The erosion of the coast
• The destruction of the great barrier reef
• The formation of volcanoes
• Examples of different types of volcanoes
• The effect of volcanic eruptions on people’s lives
• Ways to prepare for volcanic eruptions
Importance of shell nouns
• Shell/ carrier/ general/ cohesive nouns
• Information sequences
• Essential elements/ functions like words
‘have friends’
Cause effect solution
Problem solution
Past present future
Question selection/ analysis
Deciding what to focus on
• Skills/ knowledge transfer
• Sentence completion
• Old and new information
• Awareness of text structures/ information sequences –
which?
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Activating schemata
Predicting organization
Sentence/ paragraph/ text structure
Recognizing old and new information
Speed
Speed – c.300 wpm
(Nation, I.S.P. 2009. Teaching ESL/ EFL
Reading and Writing. New York. Routledge)
250-800 wpm
( Fry, E. 1963a. Teaching Faster reading: A manual.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
(Jordan, R.R. 1997. English for Academic Purposes: A
guide and
resource book for teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.)
Focus on speed and accuracy
The plane from India arrived at Heathrow Airport at 7am,
one hour after the scheduled time. There were just over
200 passengers on board, many of whom were
European tourists returning from holiday. Very few had
just hand luggage, so it took a long time for the
passengers to pick up their luggage and pass through to
the airport Arrivals Hall and Customs to meet their
friends and family. As there was an accident on the
Underground system, many passengers were delayed
on their journey into central London. Passengers could
have taken buses into the centre instead.
Sample questions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The plane belonged to British Airways.
The plane arrived on time.
Most of the passengers were European.
A small proportion of the passengers were European.
Some of the passengers were Indian.
Only a few of the passengers had no baggage except
hand luggage.
• Time management
• Tense development- range- real vs. hypothetical
• Verb/ tense sequence e.g. hedging
• Recognizing lexical cohesion
• General/ carrier/ shell/ cohesive/ summarizing nouns
• Page turning/ Learning to juggle idea/ concepts
-how many?
• Transferring (reading) skills across different texts/ skills
• Transferring skills from other macro skills
• Distinguishing between old and new information
• Vocabulary
• Wordlists- Basic 2000 words
• AWL
(Coxhead, A. 2000. A new Academic Word List. TESOL
Quarterly, 34 (2): 213–38.)
• AKL
(Paquot, M. 2010. Academic Vocabulary in Learner
Writing: From Extraction to Analysis. London & NewYork: Continuum.)
• The AWL tool
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What to focus on?
Student vocabulary
Collocations
Chunks
Noun phrases
Word families
Learning styles
Not killing students’ interest in reading by ‘doing a text to
death’
Coxhead, A. 2000. A new Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, 34 (2): 213–38.
De Chazal, E. 2014. English For Academic Purposes: Oxford Handbooks for
Language Teachers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hudson, T. D. 2007. Teaching Second Language Reading. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Jordan, R.R. 1997. English for Academic Purposes: A guide and
resource book for teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCarter, S and P. Jakes. 2009. Uncovering EAP: How to teach academic writing
and reading.. Macmillan: Oxford.
Nation, I.S.P. 2009. Teaching ESL/ EFL Reading and Writing. New York: Routledge.
Nesi, H and Gardner, S. 2012. Genres across the Disciplines: Student writing in
higher education: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nuttall, C. 2005. Teaching Reading Skills in a foreign language (2nd Edition).
Macmillan: Oxford.
Paquot, M. 2010. Academic Vocabulary in Learner Writing: From Extraction to
Analysis. London & New-York: Continuum.
Weir, C et al. 2009. The relationship between academic reading construct as
measured by IELTS and the reading experiences of students in their first year of
study at a British university. IELTS Research Reports 9: 109.
Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan.1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.