Reading skills for students preparing for the academic version of IELTS

Sam McCarter

 Questions

• Are there any stock formats/processes for the structure, content and format of IELTS questions in relation to their READING  texts?

•  • 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?

•  • 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

• 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?

• 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. The plane belonged to British Airways.

2. The plane arrived on time.

3. Most of the passengers were European.

4. A small proportion of the passengers were European.

5. Some of the passengers were Indian.

6. 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 & New-York: Continuum.)

• The AWL tool

• 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.