Understanding IELTS: Reading

EOW video – WEEK 2

Transcript

Hi everyone, welcome to this week’s video review of understanding IELTS:

Reading.

My name´s Neeraj, and I´m one of the educators on the course, speaking to you
from Barcelona, Spain. At this present time people here in Spain, and also in many
countries around the world we are being asked to stay inside our homes to prevent
the spread of coronavirus.

It´s a very challenging time for all of us, but in particular, for our front-line health
service workers, who are working so incredibly hard to help sick people get better
during this crisis.

On these online IELTS courses we often have many doctors, nurses, pharmacists
and all kinds of other healthcare workers participating as students. So, from all our
educator team I´d like to say a very special thank you to all of you for your work.
We have so much respect and admiration for what you are doing and we wish you
lots of strength and energy in this difficult time.

If ever there was a time for online learning, it´s now! So, I´d also like to say thanks
to all of you for participating and bringing this course to life. It´s so great to see
people from all over the world working together to improve their English. The
educator team have really enjoyed reading your comments and answering your
questions, and in this video, I’m going to review some of the highlights of this
weeks´ steps.

This week´s focus was really about dealing with vocabulary in the IELTS Reading
test. In addition, we focussed on practising some more typical question types like
summary paragraph completion and diagram labelling.

For many people, the principle problem when reading a text in English is not
knowing what words mean. Obviously if you know more words in a language,
you´re able to understand a written text more quickly and easily. So how do we
learn more words? We started the week by looking at how we can expand or
widen our vocabulary. In steps 2.1 and 2.2 we discussed the idea that reading
regularly about topics you like is great but reading about topics that are outside
your ´comfort zone´ is key to getting exposure to new words. I like Juan Carlos
Almanza´s post in step 2.1, he says “start with something you like and move to
something you are not so comfortable with. For example, I like reading about arts
and literature, but I know that I also need to read about science, technology and
other topics I'm not familiar with.”

If you´re wondering where to get interesting texts about unfamiliar topics, check
out the links in step 2.2. Or you can share an article you found online in step 2.5
like course participant Evgeny Novashin who says that although “I am not
interested in football at all. I've found an article about it and read it. For me it
wasn't fascinating, but I found some new words!” You can check out his article in
the link to the step below.
The United Kingdom’s international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations. We are registered in England as a charity.
Obviously when you´re reading for information or for pleasure you can use an
online dictionary to help you understand new words. I like Martina Mantovani´s
advice; she says using a monolingual dictionary, which also gives collocations of
that word (i.e. words that are used in combination) is very useful. She says that
using a monolingual dictionary is useful for getting your brain used to thinking in
English and not in your mother tongue only.

But what happens when you´re in an exam situation and you don´t have time to
look up words in a dictionary or you´re simply not allowed to use one? In steps 2.6
and 2.7 we practise using strategies to work out the meanings of unknown words.

In step 2.9 we apply some of things that we know about vocabulary learning to
paraphrasing, which is where the same information is expressed in different ways.
In the IELTS reading test there are a number of question task types that directly
test your ability to recognise paraphrased information and you can try a quiz about
this in step 2.10.

The last few steps dealt with tips, advice and extra resources. One really useful tip
comes from course participant Medo Eltaweel in step 2.15 who reminds us not to
leave any question unanswered in the exam. This is because in IELTS you don´t
have any points subtracted for wrong answers, you just get zero. Therefore, if
you´re in doubt about an answer it is always better to guess than leave it blank.

Well that´s all from me, for now. Thanks for watching this video. I hope it’s been
useful, and I look forward to seeing more of your comments and questions on the
steps. Don´t forget also that we´re holding our final Facebook Live broadcast on
Thursday 2nd April at 1.30pm UK time so please try to make it there if you can or
watch us on the recording after.

Bye for now.

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