Techniques to Improve Your IELTS Reading Speed

The primary tool to improve your reading speed is to practice reading each day from various sources. Although there is no shortcut to enhance your reading speed yet there are certain techniques that can hone your reading pace.
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1. Read every day: To improvise any skill, be it reading, the best way is to read books, journals, magazines, newspapers, etc. everyday. The more you will read something the better grasp over the text you will have and a better understanding of the content you will develop. Gradually, with continuous practice, your reading pace will increase along with comprehending the meaning of the text easily.

2. Adopt Speed Read: The most important thing about the speed read in IELTS prepration is that you have to go through the passage or the written content quickly and also retaining the maximum information from the content. And that comes with constant practice. Go through the text speedily and there are various ways evolved to do it such as pointer technique, tracker and pacer technique, scanning technique, skimming technique, etc. Let us quickly go through a few of them so we understand the techniques:

1. Pointer Technique: In this technique, you have to read quickly word by word by pointing each word with your finger.

2. Tracker and Pacer Technique: In this technique, just take a pen or a pencil and underline or track each line individually and try to read it in your mind, try to retain the important facts, figures, details or information which may be very difficult at first but eventually you will be able to capture the most of the information you read through. You can also underline or mark the important lines while you practice reading using this technique.

3. Scanning Technique: This technique is more useful when you are trying to locate very specific information in the text. That is when you scan through the text to get to the matching words or information you are looking for such as a name, factual information, etc.

4. Skimming Technique: Skimming technique is used when you have to get the basic gist of the entire passage or the text and that is when you quickly glance through the whole text without reading it word by word. This technique is best adopted when you just need the idea behind the whole passage.

3. Focus on reading: Focus is the key to retain the information in the passage even if there are a lot of distractions around you. You can gather all the important facts, figures, dates, numbers, names, etc. by reading at the places where there are a lot of distractions but despite those just trying to focus on your text and read it in your mind. This isn’t an easy thing to do but you have to be a persistent reader to be able to overcome the distractions and focus on the passage. The best way to practice this is by reading when you are traveling via bus, train or a car as there will be many distractions around you but that is something you need to learn to avoid. Once you are able to achieve it, you can read and understand any reading content without getting distracted.

4. Enhance your vocabulary: Reading not only improves your understanding of the text but also enhances your word power or vocabulary for IELTS exam. As you will read a lot from different sources such as books, magazines, etc. you will come across many new words that will stock up in your word list, try to gather them and jot them down in a separate diary along with their meanings. Review them every day so that those new words are etched in your memory. This habit will help you in a better understanding of the text because each time when you read you may come across the words you have jotted down and you will be able to comprehend the meaning of the passage quickly and easily.

5. Identify Keywords: This is yet another technique by virtue of which you are able to get to the answer much quicker. And that can be achieved if you first identify the keywords in the questions based on the passage, underline those keywords and try to find the same or similar words having the same meaning (also called synonyms) in the passage.

7. Summarize the passage: Each time when you go through some lengthy passage or any reading material/ content, make it a practice to summarize it briefly so that you know that you have understood the whole content. Summarizing means to write down a short description of what you read and what you understood in your own words. It does not have to be a very long or lengthy but just short and crisp description covering the basic concept of the whole passage/ text/ content. The easy way to do that is, formulate the basic idea of the whole paragraph in one line and continue this with each paragraph, you will get the summary of the passage/ text/ content.

By adopting all these techniques you can speed up your reading skills and at the same time can enhance your understanding capability because with continuous reading practice you will be able to comprehend the text easily. Yet again I would state that there is no easy way out to enhance the reading pace, you will have to practice with persistence.