IELTS blog

You may have read one of our posts about nine commonly-asked questions for the Listening module. In this post, I am going to discuss some frequently asked questions raised by candidates about the Reading module.

Will your culture affect your performance in IELTS Reading? Back in 1978, researchers at the University of Illinois conducted an experiment in which they asked subjects from India and the US to read two passages: one about an Indian wedding and the other about an American wedding. They then tested their reading comprehension. They found that ‘Subjects read the native passage more rapidly, recalled a larger amount of information from the native passage, produced more culturally appropriate elaborations of the native passage, and produced more culturally based distortions of the foreign passage.’ In other words, they found that your culture does affect reading performance and the way you interpret a … Read more

Certain tasks in IELTS are more predictable than the others. For example, we know that in the Listening module there is always at least one part related to education and academic knowledge. The Reading module in General Training also features topics that are fairly predictable, and there is no reason to not prepare well for them.

IELTS Reading includes unusual question types which you may not find in other reading exams. Let’s look at this example of matching headings to paragraphs.

When I have a new IELTS class, the first thing I want to assess is their exam skills. So I ask them to read and complete some IELTS Reading tasks. Almost always the questions go to one side, and the candidates focus on the text and read it word by word from beginning to end. I can always see some students panicking about words they don’t know. Meanwhile the minutes are ticking away and no answers are being noted down…