I researched the most popular reading tips and tricks so that you don't have to I'm going to show you exactly what the British Council and IDP have to say about these very very popular reading tricks and I'm also going to show you exactly how to use them and show you if they lower your score or improve your score so without further Ado let's get into it let's start off with one of the good ones so if you type into YouTube ielt reading tips and tricks the first video that comes up is this one 15 reading tips for ielt academic this is by E2 ielt and has more than half a million views at this time now their first tip is the most important one their first tip says understand the 11 different question types well is this actually correct will you get like more than 10 different types of question on the reading test so if we go to the IDP website they they have an article on there called question types in the academic reading test and it takes you through all of the different types of task types of questions that you might get so this is actually true and being aware of these different types of questions is absolutely essential you could also go on to the British Cil website and on there you will find teaching plans made for teachers by very very experienced British Council teachers and the interesting thing about this article is they have separate lesson plans for each different type of question and what it states here on the British Council website is that each question is testing different subskills this is why they ask you a range of questions they're not doing it because the people that write the tests are horrible people that want to annoy you it's because they want to test a range of different reading skills and that is a far more accurate and reliable way to test someone's reading and this is really the big difference between highquality experienced qualified teachers and maybe your local teacher with little to no experience when I was teaching at the British Council this is the way that we taught reading we had separate classes for true false not given or matching headings or multiple choice it was a different lesson plan a different class whereas you will see in this video less experience teachers will generally teach just one strategy for all types of questions and we'll see later on in the video if this is a good idea or a bad idea so why is it important to be aware of the different types of question that might come up on the reading test this is summarized perfectly by Pauline Cullen on the Cambridge website Pauline Cullen literally wrote the book on IELTS and what she says about this is every question has one clear purpose to force you to use specific reading skills in other words each question is forcing you to do different things therefore you need to be aware of that but most importantly have a separate strategy for each of the different types of questions so if you have 11 different types of questions you should have 11 different strategies that sounds like a lot of work but don't worry I will give you access to a video for free at the end of this video that will give you access to all of our step-by-step strategies for all reading questions one of the most popular videos on YouTube is one by ielt Liz called ielt reading tips true false not given and this video has 5.1 million views at the time of recording now what students want to know when it comes to tips and tricks for true false not given is some kind of tip or a trick that will help them understand the difference between true false and not given and in this video Liz puts it perfectly what she says is if it is true the statement agrees with the information if it is false the statement contradicts the information and if it is not given there is no information on this and Liz posted this 8 years ago and that test has not changed since she posted this nearly a decade ago you will also find the exact same information on the IDP website in their article ielt reading test true false not given explained it states the exact same thing so if Liz is stating it very very clearly and IDP are telling you what it means very very clearly why do students still struggle with this well the answer was revealed as I was doing my research for this video so what I did was put into the search bar I reading true false not given tips and tricks and the videos that come up show show you exactly why students struggle with this so you'll see very easy method the essential tricks the magic way magic tricks 100% true tips secret tips the truth is there are no magic tricks the real reason why you struggle with true false not given is because you're watching clickbait video after clickbait video after clickbait video all telling you the same thing that you could have understood in 5 seconds by looking at Liz's video true false not given are not actually difficult what is difficult is that you keep watching and consuming all of this information and your brain is just completely overloaded and confused and if on test day your brain is confused then everything else will be confused you were going to really struggle with the writing test because you were watching all of the these fake gurus videos if you want me just to simplify this for you again at the end of this video I'll give you a stepbystep system that you can use for true false not-given questions that has resulted in a huge number of our students getting a b nine the next tip is just having one overall strategy that will help you magically find the answer to any question and you'll often find that in videos like this I traing tips and tricks High I got a band 8 so you'll see lots of people who got a band 8 or 8.5 or 7.5 on the real test and they'll reveal how they did it so the first thing that we need to think about is is a band8 actually impressive on the writing test so I'm not going to give you my opinion I'm just going to show you data so if we look at official data from ielts.org you will see that the average reading score for a range of different countries is actually very close to a band eight the average reading score for a German speaker is 7.74 a Greek speaker 7.37 and an Indonesian speaker 6.95 now remember these are average scores these are not scores from people who call themselves I experts so band8 in the reading test is slightly above average for the average person to any intelligent person if you show them that data they will think I shouldn't listen to this person that their strategy probably doesn't work but is that actually true am I being unfair to these teachers well let's have a look at exactly what they say about their own strategy in this video with 2.3 million views they say usually I read the first question and then I start quickly reading the text not paying attention to any detail and when I feel okay the answer is Somehow Here I slow down I carefully read the sentence I read the second question I resume reading the text this strategy allows me to finish my reading section much more quickly so is this incredibly vague strategy actually helpful well we need to go back to the first part of the video where we showed you that at the British Council they have separate lesson plans for each different type of question why do the experience professional teachers at the British Council do that but people showing you how they got a band eight on YouTube do it the opposite way they have one strategy for all types of question so let me demonstrate exactly what you should do using real questions so this is a matching headings question where they give you a list of headings and they give you the text so we first need to think about what skills are being tested what subskills are being tested well the main thing that they're testing with matching headings questions is can you understand the main idea of each paragraph that is why they are asking you to match headings because they're testing that subskill can you look at a text and understand the general meaning of each paragraph now let's compare that with a true false not-given question in a true false not given question they are testing very very different things they are testing your ability not to read generally and understand the general meaning they are testing your ability to read much more carefully to scan and find the location of the correct answer and then read very very carefully in order to understand specific information within sentences and paragraphs so completely different question questions that require completely different strategies let me show you for a matching headings question because they are testing your ability to understand the general meaning of the paragraphs that should be your main focus if you focus in on the headings you're wasting your time and you're going to get very very confused so what you should do first is read the paragraphs you should not look at the headings until you read the paragraphs true false not given is the opposite you need to understand specific information and then you need to scan where in the passage is the correct information and then focus in on that so you should do the opposite you should read the questions first so anyone that tells you that you should just read and see how you feel and then when you feel something you should slow down and then have a look and you know that will help you they are demonstrating that they don't know what they're doing not that they do know what they're doing if they really knew what they were doing they would get a b nine so never listen to anyone who teaches you one strategy for all the different types of questions and especially do not listen to anyone who tells you just skim and scan and then you'll magically find the correct answer and that brings us on to our next tip so skimming and scanning you'll find this a lot on I YouTube in ielt books and in every ielt classroom in the world but it is one of the most misunderstood areas of I reading to demonstrate let's look at a video that has nearly 5 million views called ielt reading top 10 tips now her first tip is don't read slowly you should just skim to get the main idea and then scan to get detail and then she also says don't spend too much time reading the passages so most of the advice that you'll see on YouTube related to skimming and scanning is designed to help students get through the questions as quickly as possible but does it actually help you improve your score so if we go to the IDP website and look at an article there called how to skim and scan for keywords in your ILS test it states in order to help you decrease the amount of time it takes to complete the reading section of the ISS test you need to practice using skimming and scanning techniques so so far so good what IDP are saying here is skimming and scanning are useful tools useful skills to have and they will help you but like any tool if I give you a hammer or a saw they are useful but only if you use them correctly again if we go to Pauline cullins article on cambridge.org she says every question has one clear purpose to force you to use specific reading skills so telling student students don't read slowly and don't spend too much time reading the passages is terrible advice for two reasons number one it ignores the most important is reading skill which is reading for detail this means that when you find the location of the correct answer you're not just skimming for General meaning and then finding the location by scanning you then have to read in detail to understand and find the correct answer skimming and scanning just get you to the location they don't help you find and establish the correct answer when you're going to do the OT test a taxi takes you to the test center but you need to get out of that taxi and actually do the test telling students just skim and scan is also a terrible idea because in some questions you will be skimming a lot in other questions you won't be skimming at all in some questions you will be scamming scanning a lot they'll be testing that skill in other questions you will not be scanning at all in some questions you'll be skimming first then scanning in other questions you'll be scanning first and then skimming it completely ignores the specificity of each question type there's two things that you can do now number one you can go to this video that has all of the strategies in it but I would also recommend this video that is going to show you how to improve and constantly improve your I reading score through using techniques and strategies that actually work and have worked for thousands of our I VIP students so pick one of these thank you