EPISODE 8
My 5 top tips for getting full marks in OET READING PART A
Before we start the main episode I want to tell you about my exciting new free training that you can access right now. This is for OET students (don’t worry, I’m putting together some free training for IELTS students soon).
This training is all about getting you organised and focussed on the correct fundamentals of your preparation so that you are on the right track to getting the score you need.
It covers:
· How to have the right study mindset
· I show you how to find time to study, everyday, no matter how busy you are
· I show you how to create a practical study timetable every week
· The exact skills you need to improve and how to improve them, so your reading, listening, speaking and writing skills
· Reliable, free resources to use to improve each sub skill and how to use those resources.
· Understanding the marking criteria and how this can help you to prepare and improve
· How to improve your grammar and vocabulary
If you are taking the test for the first time or taken it a few times, this training is a must if you want to make sure you are doing all the right things in your preparation.
You can find a link to the training in the show notes where you will also find links to my private study groups for both IELTS and OET in Facebook.
Ok, on with this episode.
This episode is all about OET READING PART A.
A lot of students either find part A really easy or really difficult. I’d love to know which one you are.
There are a few strategies for completing part A questions and I teach the one I feel is the most effective and efficient way and the one that most of my students find the easiest.
The first point I need to make here is that you must have a method, you must have a set strategy for answering questions, for the whole of OET or IELTS. If you don’t, then you are wasting time trying to work out how to answer the questions. When you know exactly how you are going to tackle the questions you can “hit the ground running”, you can just get on straight away and find the answers.
Whatever, method you choose, and I would suggest you try a few and choose one that you feel the most comfortable with, and then just stick to it and practice it so much that it “becomes second nature to you”.
So you need to understand what skills the examiner is testing in this section and with these types of questions.
In this section, the examiner is testing your ability to read and understand different texts as quickly as possible, testing not only your skimming and scanning techniques but also vocabulary and spelling, and it’s important to remember this, so you make sure that these are the things you are practicing and improving.
For the first seven question, you need to quickly understand and be able to differentiate between each text, using a combination skimming and scanning techniques, using your vocabulary knowledge to identify key words from the text and the questions.
Vocabulary plays a huge part of the whole test but especially so in the reading test and part A. Your vocabulary knowledge will help you to identify the key words in both the text and the question. These can be synonyms, antonyms and paraphrasing of the question. In order to find the right answer you need to have a good range of vocabulary.
You need to be able to understand the general gist of the text very quickly, so reading the headlines or sub headings, reading the first and last line of each paragraph.
Spelling is very important. If you spell the word incorrectly, you will get it wrong, even if the answer was right.
Now, Part A is the easiest section, the other sections get harder. So if you practice enough and practice correctly, there are no reasons why you can’t score full marks in part a
So here my 5 top tips for making sure you get the maximum marks for part A. But please remember, these tips require you to be proactive in your learning, you need to breakdown the skills and practice them by doing individual tasks that help to build up those skills. If you do this regularly, you will see a huge improvement. You need to trust the process and just do the work.
So what are my 5 top tips for part a?
1. Practice skimming and scanning, basically what this means is that you are practicing reading an article/document and understanding the general gist of it as quickly and accurately as possible, so this is skimming and there a number of ways to master this technique. You don’t have enough time to read every single word so you have to skim read, this is basically running your eyes very quickly over the text and identifying keywords and understanding the general topic/meaning/message of the text.
To practice this you need to, guess what, read, skim read. So for example, getting different articles/documents and skim read by reading titles, sub headings, reading the first and last lines of the paragraphs, running your eyes over the words. Once you think you understand the general meaning you can read the text in more detail to see if you were right.
Scanning practice is also key. You need scanning techniques where you need to find more specific information as in the questions 8 onwards. So use the same articles to identify key words in the article which give detailed information.
This is not the most exciting tasks to do, nevertheless, it has to be done. The more you do this, the faster your skimming and scanning techniques will be and faster you will read. These two skills are the key reading skills that are tested because in real life you do this all the time without even realising it, in your native language …now you just need to master the same skill in English.
2. You must work on your vocabulary skills. This is a must for all of OET. You need to work on this actively everyday if you want to improve. I’m not going into detail about this because, this is such an important topic I did a whole podcast episode on it where I talk about how to practice and learn vocabulary the right way, and the link is in the show notes.
3. Practice your spelling. I understand this can make you feel a bit like a child again at school, it may even bring back bad memories, but if it means getting the score you need and getting your dream job, it’s worth braking through those memories and working hard to minimise spelling errors.
There a few ways to do this. The first method is to keep a running list of spelling mistakes you make regularly and of new words you need to learn, make sure when you learn new words, you also learn the spelling, which is a part of being able to use the word accurately…..when you listen to episode 3 about vocabulary, this will become a lot clearer.
Also make a list of spelling mistakes from past reading tests and practice those. Test yourself on a regular basis, get someone else to test you. Make this one of your DNNs, your daily non negotiables. So these are tasks that you must complete no matter what happens during the day, no matter how busy you get, you will spend 5/ 10 minutes doing this non negotiable task to keep you moving forward in your preparation.
4. Use past reading papers you have completed to analyse your mistakes. These could be spelling mistakes, mistakes regarding vocabulary, where you have misunderstood the word, or not known the word. Why did you get the answer wrong? Did you answer make grammatical sense?
Also, analyse the correct answers, analyse the texts, analyse how the questions are worded, what vocabulary is used, how are the questions paraphrased? By doing this you’re almost reverse engineering the process by looking at the answer first and analysing why the answer is correct.
5. Practice, practice practice! All of what I have just mentioned, practice until it becomes second nature to you, and your reading speed increases.
So, my question to you is, what are you going to do with this information? What are you going to implement? Remember, you have to actually take action and do the work, everyday!
So get going.
Questions.
Find out what the expressions in highlighted in yellow mean.