My ultimate IELTS Reading Strategy

When I first meet my students in our 1-on-1 IELTS classes on Verbling, they often say they have trouble with the IELTS Reading section of the test.

Their most common complaints are running out of time, and “understanding” the text, but not being able to find the answer.

When this happens, I give my student an IELTS Reading passage from a Cambridge preparation book, and I ask them to tell me their approach to the task.

This is when I realise the main cause of their problems.

The majority of students I see follow a popular strategy that is recommended by many well-known IELTS sites and tutors.

“Skim and scan the entire passage.”
“Read through all the questions before you start the passage.”

However, I’ve found that this approach only causes immense stress, confusion, and makes the IELTS Reading more difficult than it needs to be.

I should know. I tried it.

When I tried to follow the advice of many popular IELTS sites, I too became quickly confused and overwhelmed if I skimmed and scanned. And I’m a native British speaker with an English degree.

When I skimmed all the paragraphs and read the questions, I could vaguely remember some of the answers but it was extremely hard to find the exact paragraph that had the information I needed. I started searching, but I often couldn’t find it for about 2 minutes.

2 minutes felt like a life time. I got stressed, I started scanning faster, I stopped properly reading the sentences – and this was me practising on my own, with no exam pressure or time limit.

So instead, I sat down and attempted the IELTS Reading passages the way that made sense to me. After a few practise tests, I realised that there is a much easier, simpler way to tackle IELTS Reading.

How to improve your IELTS Reading score

I discovered a much simpler technique that works for me and all of my 1-on-1 IELTS students that I show it to.

#1 – Focus on only 1 paragraph at a time

When you open the first passage of your IELTS Reading test, do not read all the questions. Do not skim the entire passage.

Focus 100% of your energy on the 1st paragraph only. Read it at least 2 times.

I often read it 3 times to make sure I completely absorb every detail.

There are a couple of key benefits to this:

It’s easier to remember the information in a smaller amount of text
Because it’s small, I have time to read the paragraph 2 or 3 times to understand it more deeply

#2 – Look at all the questions

Because you should have read the paragraph 2 or 3 times, the information in it should be fresh in your mind and finding answers should be a little easier.

Read through all the questions, because sometimes a paragraph could contain answers in a few different groups. For example, Paragraph #1 could have answers for Question #1, Question #6 and Question #10.

When you are confident that you have answered all the questions you can using that paragraph, move on to Step #3.

#3 – Forget the last paragraph, and focus 100% on the next one.

You do not have to understand, recollect, re-tell, or present your views on the whole article. When you finish 1 paragraph and answer all the questions you can get from it, you can forget it and focus all your attention on the next paragraph instead. You should never need to go back to it.

Again, read the paragraph at least 2 times. Then read through all the questions.

Bonus! A bonus point of this strategy is that because you have read the questions so many times, you start to remember the questions too.

So usually, by the 6th or 7th paragraph, my students can spot the answer the 1st time they read a new paragraph. If you feel like you are losing time by reading the paragraph twice or 3 times, remember that you will save that time near the end of the passage.