Help with IELTS #3 – tips for the Academic Reading test
In the third in our series of blog posts designed to help you prepare your students for IELTS, Pauline Cullen, author of The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS, offers some tips on dealing with the Academic Reading test.
When you are preparing your students for the Academic Reading test, it’s very important to remember what its purpose is. The IELTS test is specifically designed to assess and measure the different reading skills needed for university study. If you just see the reading test in terms of answering questions and getting them right or wrong, then it’s easy to forget this.
When I talk to teachers and students, they say that they prefer certain reading test questions. However, True/ False/Not Given questions (T/F/NG) are almost always among the least favourite, so today I hope I can make you think about them differently. I actually like T/F/NG questions, and I like teaching students about them because they have a very positive ‘washback’ effect to the EAP classroom. This means that the reading skills you need to focus on to answer the questions are important skills for EAP.
When I talk to teachers and students, they say that they prefer certain reading test questions. However, True/ False/Not Given questions (T/F/NG) are almost always among the least favourite, so today I hope I can make you think about them differently. I actually like T/F/NG questions, and I like teaching students about them because they have a very positive ‘washback’ effect to the EAP classroom. This means that the reading skills you need to focus on to answer the questions are important skills for EAP.
True/False/Not Given – References in reverse
In EAP, we teach students that when they write an academic assignment they must give references to support their claims and ideas. T/F/NG (and Y/N/NG – Yes/No/Not Given) questions are really a way of practising that in reverse. The questions ask you to say whether the reading passage:
In EAP, we teach students that when they write an academic assignment they must give references to support their claims and ideas. T/F/NG (and Y/N/NG – Yes/No/Not Given) questions are really a way of practising that in reverse. The questions ask you to say whether the reading passage:
• provides supporting evidence for an idea (True)
• says the opposite of an idea (False)
• does not have enough information to check whether an idea is true or false (Not Given).
• says the opposite of an idea (False)
• does not have enough information to check whether an idea is true or false (Not Given).
Tips for students
To help your students understand how these questions work, tell them to see the sentences in the questions as ideas or claims that a student has made in an academic assignment. The reading passage is the reference material that the student has listed in their bibliography. So for this type of question, their task is really to check whether the reading passage is an appropriate source (TRUE) or whether it contradicts the ideas or claims (FALSE) or doesn’t mention the ideas at all (NOT GIVEN).
To help your students understand how these questions work, tell them to see the sentences in the questions as ideas or claims that a student has made in an academic assignment. The reading passage is the reference material that the student has listed in their bibliography. So for this type of question, their task is really to check whether the reading passage is an appropriate source (TRUE) or whether it contradicts the ideas or claims (FALSE) or doesn’t mention the ideas at all (NOT GIVEN).
Another important tip is to teach your students that these questions are always in the same order as the information in the passage. This means that they are not expected to search the whole passage for the information. The questions will contain some clues about where to look and check. But, just as we teach our EAP classes to paraphrase ideas and not simply copy words from their source materials, the questions may not use exactly the same words as in the question.
No comments:
Post a Comment