 Hi everyone, it's Michelle here from IELTS Advantage. Today we're going to be talking about how you can increase your reading speed. Now the IELTS reading test isn't easy. You've only got 60 minutes to answer 40 questions and if you can read faster it's obviously going to make this a lot easier. Now everybody knows this and so often the advice that students are given is that what you need to do to read faster is skim and scan. Now skimming is part of the strategy that you'll use to answer the different question types but in itself it's not enough to get the correct answer. So we're not going to focus on skimming today. What I'm going to show you is a strategy that you can use to increase your reading speed so that once you know sort of where the answer the correct answer might or might not be in the text you can read carefully to find that answer but you can read a little bit faster. So that's what we're going to focus on today and at the end of the video I'm going to give you a task that you can use to practice with. All right, so how do you read faster and why should you not rely on skimming? Well the research varies but a lot of researchers believe that in order to actually skim a text you need to know anywhere between 95 and 98 percent of the words in order to skim and most students don't know that percentage of words in an IELTS test. I mean think about it this way right the IELTS test is one test and it has to be hard enough to determine whether or not somebody is a band seven or a band eight or a band nine. So if you're a band eight you'll get some questions wrong but if you're a band nine you won't and the reason students get questions wrong on the reading test is usually because of vocabulary. So if you're sort of at an intermediate or upper intermediate or even you know advanced C1 level of English there will be words in the test in the reading test that you don't know. So the number one thing that you can do to improve your reading score is to increase your vocabulary and we've got some great resources that Chris has put together on our YouTube page to help you improve your vocabulary. If you improve your vocabulary it will make it a lot easier to skim but skimming is still not enough to find the correct answer. What you need to do to find the correct answer is very close reading. Now what I'm going to show you is how you can get faster at this close reading. So again how you get faster at skimming is improving your vocabulary. So here's how I know that you need to know a lot of words in order to be able to skim. This is a book that I read recently. It's called This Is Going to Hurt. It's written by a man called Adam Kay. He was a doctor in the hospitals here in the UK in the NHS and he wrote a memoir. That's quite funny. A little bit sad but also quite funny and I read this book quite quickly so you know there's about this many words on the page. I could probably was reading a page in less than a minute because I'm a pretty quick reader but here's what I noticed about this book in particular. I was reading, reading along and then I'd get to a word like this one which you probably can't see but it's got a little asterisk by it which means that he's had to explain it. Now because he's talking about his job working as a doctor there's a lot of medical terminology that I don't know. Now a lot of our VIP students are medical professionals. They might know these words. I don't know these words. Some of you watching might be medical professionals and you might know these words as well but I don't. So whenever I came to one of these words it's like somebody had hit the brakes. I didn't know it. I didn't know how to sound it out. I didn't know how to pronounce it. I'd have to then go and read what it meant and then I'd have to come back remember sort of what he was talking about and then carry on reading. So this every time I ran into a word that I didn't know like this it really really slowed me down. Now if there if this was full of words like that there's no way I could skim this text because I just wouldn't know enough of the words. As it goes I can skim it here and I can you know I can sort of run my eyes over the text and there's enough words that I recognize. I could tell you roughly what it's about but then remember to get the right answer for the reading test. You need to do a close reading. Now if I came to one of those words in the close reading it would still slow me down and I might get the answer wrong if I don't know the words. So again improving your vocabulary is the most important thing that you can do to increase your reading score but how can you just start to read faster? You know how can you pick up a book like this and read a page in less than a minute and understand 99% of it when you know enough vocabulary? Well here's here's one idea okay so when you're reading you know to really understand you should be reading at about 200 to 230 words a minute. Skimming by the way is about 700 words a minute so a lot of a lot of students and a lot of people in generally they read like this they put their finger under the word and they move their finger along word by word and they don't say the words out loud but they say them silently in their head. This process is called sub vocalization and basically what it does is it limits your reading speed to the speed that you would read if you were reading out loud. Now you can try this in your first language and I bet that if you read out loud you read a lot slower than if you read silently. So here's one way that you can sort of break the habit of sub vocalization. So people will read so they'll often you know get a piece of paper or something and they'll put it under or their finger or something they'll put it under the line so they'll start with here and they'll be okay Sunday 17 October 2004 and then they'll move it down and it'll be to give myself a bit of credit. I didn't panic when the patient I was reviewing on the ward unexpectedly started holding enormous quantities of blood. Yeah you have to have a strong stomach to read this book. See that's quite slow no isn't it and if you read this slowly it's going to make it hard to answer all the questions on the IELTS reading test so here's what you can do. Take your same piece of paper but don't put it under the words like this put it over the words so it comes down and it covers them. So I'm still doing my eyes are still going along the you know the the lines like this but what I'm doing by moving this card down over the lines and I can choose the speed right I could do it really quickly or I could do it a little bit slower but what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to force my eyes to move faster than my mouth would be able to actually say the words so what I'm training my brain is to recognize the words and to understand the words without actually hearing the words in my head and if you can do that you are really really going to increase your reading speed. Of course if I was doing this myself and I was you know I was moving the piece of paper down over top of the words and I got to a word that I didn't know and I kept going what I would do is I would make some guess about what it was okay this is some kind of emergency this is some kind of medicine this is some kind of disease right that's because I know the context it's probably one of these things and then I would keep going. Now the more words I run into that I don't know of course the the harder this is but I can still work on increasing my reading speed that way so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you a text it's about 350 words long and I'm going to show it to you at 200 words a minute so remember I said if you are reading for comprehension right most people read at between 200 and 230 words a minute for comprehension this is the close reading where you understand everything you're reading so that you could then answer one of the IELTS reading questions so what I want you to do is I want you just to try it okay so I'm going to put it up on the screen and I want you it's going to the words are going to flash like one by one it's using a program called speed reader either there's a free app and then there's also a paid version so we're going to use the free the free app so I'm going to show you the text and then at the end what I would like you to do down below in the comments is I'd like you to tell me you know what would be a good title for this article it comes from a newspaper and it comes from the lifestyle section so it's not an academic or medical topic so you know a title of an article gives the reader some idea what it's about it doesn't have to be witty or clever but just generally what what is it about if you can make a title that means you've understood enough of of the article so let's let's try it all right everyone here we go let's begin all right that was it post your answers down below compare with what other students have written if you've kind of got you know more or less the same kind of information then then that's great so with this app you can copy and paste any text from the internet and you can also vary the speed so you can slow it down a little bit if you need or you can speed it up a bit if you want to give yourself a challenge so you've got this tool online to use you've also got the technique that I showed you about moving a piece of paper and down and covering the words as you go ideally to do this practice you would find a a text or a book where you knew almost all of the words like if there is maybe one or two new words on the page that you don't know that's an ideal level so graded readers are great for this if you have access to them or even just something you know that that's easy so something that maybe you know you've read before or something with a vocabulary that you're familiar with because then you can just focus on the speed and you're not getting too tied up in in too many new words so if you found this useful and you would like more advice on how you can improve your IELTS score please subscribe to our YouTube page bye everyone