00:00:00
hi everyone it's michelle here from
00:00:01
ielts advantage
00:00:03
today we're going to be talking about
00:00:04
how you can increase your reading speed
00:00:07
now the ielts reading test isn't easy
00:00:10
you've only got 60 minutes
00:00:12
to answer 40 questions and if you can
00:00:15
read faster it's obviously going to make
00:00:17
this
00:00:18
a lot easier now everybody knows this
00:00:20
and so often the advice that students
00:00:22
are given
00:00:23
is that what you need to do to read
00:00:25
faster is skim
00:00:26
and scan now skimming is part of the
00:00:30
strategy that you'll use to answer the
00:00:33
different question types
00:00:35
but in itself it's not enough to get the
00:00:38
correct answer
00:00:39
so we're not going to focus on skimming
00:00:41
today what i'm going to show you
00:00:43
is a strategy that you can use to
00:00:46
increase your reading speed
00:00:47
so that once you know sort of where the
00:00:50
answer the correct answer might or might
00:00:52
not be
00:00:53
in the text you can read carefully to
00:00:56
find that answer but you can
00:00:58
read a little bit faster so that's what
00:01:00
we're going to focus on
00:01:01
today and at the end of the video i'm
00:01:03
going to give you a task
00:01:05
that you can use to practice with all
00:01:08
right
00:01:08
so how do you read faster and why should
00:01:11
you not rely on skimming
00:01:14
well the research varies but a lot of
00:01:16
researchers
00:01:17
believe that in order to actually skim
00:01:21
a text you need to know anywhere between
00:01:24
95 and
00:01:26
98 of the words in order to skim
00:01:29
and most students don't know
00:01:33
that percentage of words in an ielts
00:01:35
test i mean
00:01:36
think about it this way right the ielts
00:01:38
test is one test and it has to be
00:01:40
hard enough to determine whether or not
00:01:44
somebody is a band seven or a band eight
00:01:46
or a band nine so if you're
00:01:48
a band eight you'll get some questions
00:01:51
wrong but if you're a band nine
00:01:53
you won't and the reason students get
00:01:55
questions wrong
00:01:56
on the reading test is usually because
00:01:59
of vocabulary
00:02:00
so if if you're sort of at an
00:02:03
intermediate or
00:02:04
upper intermediate or even you know
00:02:06
advanced c1 level
00:02:08
of english there will be words in the
00:02:10
test
00:02:11
in the reading test that you don't know
00:02:14
so
00:02:15
the number one thing that you can do to
00:02:17
improve your reading score
00:02:19
is to increase your vocabulary and we've
00:02:21
got
00:02:22
some great resources that chris has put
00:02:24
together on our youtube page to help you
00:02:27
improve your vocabulary
00:02:29
if you improve your vocabulary it will
00:02:31
make it a lot easier
00:02:32
to skim but skimming is still not enough
00:02:35
to find the correct answer
00:02:37
what you need to do to find the correct
00:02:39
answer is
00:02:41
very close reading now what i'm going to
00:02:44
show you is how you can get faster at
00:02:46
this close
00:02:46
reading so again how you get faster at
00:02:49
skimming
00:02:50
is improving your vocabulary so here's
00:02:52
how i know
00:02:53
that you need to know a lot of words in
00:02:55
order to be able to skim
00:02:57
this is a book that i read recently it's
00:02:59
called this is going to hurt it's
00:03:01
written by a man called adam k
00:03:03
he was a doctor in the
00:03:06
hospitals here in in the uk in the nhs
00:03:10
and he wrote a memoir as quite funny a
00:03:13
little bit sad but but also quite funny
00:03:15
and i read this book quite
00:03:19
quickly so you know there's about this
00:03:21
many words on the page i could probably
00:03:24
was reading a page in less than a minute
00:03:26
because i'm a pretty quick
00:03:27
reader but here's what i noticed about
00:03:29
this book in particular
00:03:32
i was reading reading along and then i
00:03:34
get to a word
00:03:35
like this one which you probably can't
00:03:37
see but it's got a little asterisk
00:03:40
by it which means that he's had to
00:03:42
explain it
00:03:43
now because he's talking about his job
00:03:45
working as a doctor
00:03:47
there's a lot of medical terminology
00:03:49
that
00:03:50
i don't know now a lot of our vip
00:03:52
students are medical
00:03:54
professionals they might know these
00:03:55
words i don't know
00:03:57
these words some of you watching might
00:03:59
be
00:04:00
medical professionals and you might know
00:04:02
these words as well
00:04:04
but i don't so whenever i came to one of
00:04:06
these words
00:04:07
it's like somebody hit the brakes
00:04:11
i didn't know it i didn't know how to
00:04:13
sound it out i didn't know how to
00:04:14
pronounce it
00:04:16
i'd have to then go and read what it
00:04:18
meant
00:04:19
and then i'd have to come back remember
00:04:22
sort of what he was talking about and
00:04:23
then carry on reading
00:04:25
so this every time i ran into a word
00:04:28
that i didn't know
00:04:29
like this it really really slowed me
00:04:31
down
00:04:33
now if they're if this was
00:04:36
full of words like that there is no way
00:04:39
i could skim this text because i just
00:04:42
wouldn't know
00:04:43
enough of the words as it goes i can
00:04:46
skim it
00:04:47
here and i can you know i can sort of
00:04:49
run my eyes over the text and
00:04:51
there's enough words that i recognize i
00:04:53
could tell you roughly
00:04:55
what it's about but then remember to get
00:04:58
the right answer for the reading test
00:04:59
you need to do a close reading now
00:05:01
if i came to one of those words in the
00:05:04
close reading
00:05:05
it would still slow me down and i might
00:05:07
get the answer wrong
00:05:08
if i don't know the words so again
00:05:12
improving your vocabulary is the most
00:05:14
important thing that you can do to
00:05:16
increase your
00:05:17
reading score but how can you just start
00:05:20
to read
00:05:21
faster you know how can you pick up a
00:05:23
book
00:05:24
like this and read a page in less than a
00:05:26
minute and
00:05:27
understand 99 of it
00:05:31
when you know enough vocabulary well
00:05:34
here's here's one
00:05:35
idea okay so
00:05:38
when you're reading you know to really
00:05:40
understand you should be reading at
00:05:42
about
00:05:43
200 to 230 words a minute skimming
00:05:46
by the way is about 700 words a minute
00:05:50
so a lot of a lot of students and a lot
00:05:52
of people and generally
00:05:54
they they read like this they put their
00:05:56
finger under
00:05:57
the word and they move their finger
00:06:01
along word by word and they don't say
00:06:04
the words out loud but they say them
00:06:07
silently
00:06:08
in their head this process is called sub
00:06:11
vocalization and basically what it does
00:06:15
is it limits your reading speed
00:06:17
to the speed that you would read if you
00:06:19
were reading
00:06:20
out loud now you can try this in your
00:06:22
first language
00:06:24
and i bet that if you read out loud
00:06:27
you read a lot slower than if you read
00:06:29
silently
00:06:31
so here's one way that you can sort of
00:06:34
break the habit of sub-vocalization
00:06:37
so people will will read
00:06:41
so they'll often you know get a piece of
00:06:43
paper or something and they'll put it
00:06:44
under or their finger or something
00:06:47
they'll put it under
00:06:48
the line so they'll start with here and
00:06:50
they'll be okay sunday
00:06:51
17 october 20 2004 and then they'll move
00:06:54
it down
00:06:55
and it'll be to give myself a bit of
00:06:57
credit i didn't panic
00:06:59
when the patient i was reviewing on the
00:07:02
ward unexpectedly
00:07:03
started hosing enormous quantities of
00:07:05
blood
00:07:06
uh yeah you have to have a strong
00:07:09
stomach
00:07:10
to read this book see that's quite slow
00:07:12
though isn't it
00:07:14
and if you read this slowly
00:07:17
it's going to make it hard to answer all
00:07:19
the questions on the ielts reading test
00:07:21
so here's what you can do
00:07:22
take your same piece of paper but don't
00:07:24
put it under the words
00:07:26
like this put it over the words so it
00:07:28
comes down
00:07:29
and it covers them so i'm still doing
00:07:33
my eyes are still going along the you
00:07:35
know the lines
00:07:36
like this but what i'm doing by moving
00:07:40
this
00:07:40
card down over the lines and i can
00:07:43
choose the speed
00:07:44
right i could do it really quickly or i
00:07:47
could do it a little
00:07:48
bit slower but what i'm trying to do is
00:07:51
i'm trying to force my eyes
00:07:53
to move faster than my mouth would be
00:07:57
able to actually say the words
00:07:59
so what i'm training my brain is to
00:08:01
recognize
00:08:02
the words and to understand the words
00:08:04
without
00:08:05
actually hearing the words in my head
00:08:08
and if you can do that
00:08:10
you are really really going to increase
00:08:12
your reading
00:08:13
speed of course if i was doing this
00:08:16
myself
00:08:17
and i was you know i was moving the
00:08:19
piece of paper down
00:08:20
over top of the words and i got to a
00:08:22
word that i didn't know
00:08:24
and i kept going what i would do
00:08:28
is i would make some guess about what it
00:08:30
was okay this is some kind of emergency
00:08:33
this is some kind of medicine this is
00:08:35
some kind of disease
00:08:37
right that's because i know the context
00:08:39
it's probably one of these things and
00:08:40
then i would
00:08:41
keep going now the more words i run into
00:08:44
that i don't know of course the harder
00:08:47
this is
00:08:48
but i can still work on increasing my
00:08:50
reading speed
00:08:51
that way so what i'm going to do now
00:08:54
is i'm going to show you
00:08:57
a text it's about 350 words long
00:09:02
and i'm going to show it to you at 200
00:09:05
words
00:09:06
a minute so remember i said if you're
00:09:08
reading for comprehension
00:09:10
right most people read at between 200
00:09:13
and 230 words
00:09:14
a minute for comprehension this is the
00:09:17
close reading where you
00:09:18
understand everything you're reading so
00:09:20
that you could then answer
00:09:22
one of the ielts reading questions so
00:09:24
what i want you to do
00:09:26
is i want you just to try it okay so i'm
00:09:28
going to put it up on the screen
00:09:30
and i want you it's going to the words
00:09:33
are going to flash like one
00:09:34
by one it's using a program called speed
00:09:37
reader
00:09:38
there's a free app and then there's also
00:09:39
a paid version so we're going to use the
00:09:41
free
00:09:42
the free app so i'm going to show you
00:09:44
the text and then
00:09:45
at the end what i would like you to do
00:09:47
down below in the comments
00:09:49
is i'd like you to tell me you know what
00:09:52
would be a good title
00:09:53
for this article it comes from a
00:09:56
newspaper
00:09:57
and it comes from the lifestyle section
00:10:00
so it's not
00:10:01
an academic or medical
00:10:04
topic so you know a title of an article
00:10:08
gives the reader some idea what it's
00:10:10
about it doesn't have to be witty or
00:10:12
clever but just
00:10:13
generally what what is it about if you
00:10:15
can make a title that means you've
00:10:17
understood
00:10:18
enough of of the article so let's let's
00:10:22
try it
00:10:23
all right everyone here we go let's
00:10:30
begin
00:10:45
you
00:12:16
all right that was it post your answers
00:12:20
down below compare with what other
00:12:22
students have written if you've kind of
00:12:24
got you know more or less
00:12:26
the same kind of information then then
00:12:28
that's great
00:12:29
so with this app you can copy and paste
00:12:32
any text from the internet and you can
00:12:34
also vary the speed so you can slow it
00:12:36
down a little bit
00:12:38
if you need or you can speed it up a bit
00:12:40
if you want to give yourself a challenge
00:12:42
so you've got this tool online to use
00:12:44
you've also got the technique
00:12:46
that i showed you about moving a piece
00:12:49
of paper
00:12:50
and down and covering the words as you
00:12:53
go
00:12:54
ideally to do this practice you would
00:12:57
find
00:12:58
a a text or a book where you knew
00:13:02
almost all of the words like if there is
00:13:04
maybe one or two new words on the page
00:13:07
that you don't know
00:13:08
that's an ideal level so graded readers
00:13:12
are great for this if you have access to
00:13:14
them
00:13:15
or even just something you know that
00:13:17
that's easy so something that maybe
00:13:19
you know you've read before or something
00:13:21
with the vocabulary
00:13:23
that you're familiar with because then
00:13:25
you can just focus on the speed and
00:13:26
you're not getting too
00:13:28
tied up in into many new words so if you
00:13:31
found this useful
00:13:32
and you would like more advice on how
00:13:35
you can improve your ielts score
00:13:37
please subscribe to our youtube page bye
00:13:41
[Music]
00:13:46
everyone
00:13:49
[Music]
00:13:53
you
