3 skills that will improve your Reading score

You should recognise and practice 3 Reading skills that are valuable to your achieving your best score in this part of the test.

You need to practice these skills to help you reach your target score.

Is the Reading test really a check of how well you read, or how quickly you can find 40 answers?

K1 – 'Know the test'. There are 3 reading passages and you have 60 minutes to find 40 answers in those texts. There are 9 *types of questions.

Three of your reading skills are being tested. 

These skills are : –

1.  SKIMMING
2.  SCANNING
3.  PREDICTING

Let’s start with Skimming and Scanning skills – what’s the difference, and why are these skills important?

SKIMMING - means reading very quickly. To skim you read the title, the author’s name, look at any visuals in the test, read the sub-headings and captions under the visuals.

Look at each paragraph and underline or highlight the first sentence in each paragraph. 

If you skim a text you’re also looking at the way the text (the passage) is organized. Then you start to PREDICT. 

That’s another important reading skill. Now you’re engaging with the passage and you’re getting the main ideas that the writer is presenting to you.

You should also skim the questions. Check the question types and what you have to do.  Label the question types with a code e.g. multiple choice questions – mc, labelling a diagram – ld, completing a table – ct. 

Write that code next to the questions in your test.

SCANNING means that you are looking for ‘something’specific in the text. Just like a scanner at the airport or a hospital, you are now looking at the passage and searching in the text for a particular ‘something’.

This ‘something’ could be a date, a name, an address, a number, or a word. And this 'something' that you’re scanning for should be connected to the answer for the questions.

Again, you should also scan the questions. Look at the questions and underline and highlight the key words in each question. Circle the instructions that are given e.g.“use no more than THREE words in your answer”.

Both skimming and scanning are “enabling” skills. They help you or enable you to effectively answer most of the questions in the Reading section of the test.