 So today we're going to answer a question that we often get which is why is my IELTS reading score not increasing? And there are four key things that we're going to talk about today to explain why students no matter how much work they do They still struggle to increase their reading score. So when students email us and tell us My score is not improving. They're often frustrated for one of two reasons Normally, they say that they have done Some kind of reading course that has lots of strategies in them So they'll say I have completed this course or I am following these strategies and My score is not increasing also. Commonly we get Students who say I have done all of the practice tests that I can find I've done all of the Cambridge books all of the online tests and my score is still not increasing And the problem is is that if you are just relying on doing lots of practice tests This is not going to help you increase your score at all. In fact, it can lower your score Because if you're doing the wrong things Practicing doing the wrong things is going to lead to you getting worse not better Also, many students have a misconception about Learning on a course or learning strategies and thinking that these will automatically increase their score In fact, if you do it wrong, it will decrease your score So in order to solve this problem, we teach our students four simple things So what we do is we explain to them that the strategy that we're going to use is Kind of like a car. So I know that This is a beautiful drawing of a car. I know that my my drawing is amazing So thank you so much for for complimenting me in the comments on that, but a car has four tires Okay, so it doesn't matter how good your car is you could have a brand new Tesla worth a hundred thousand dollars if one of your tires is busted that car is completely useless These four things over here Represent the four tires and if one of these things is missing Then it doesn't matter how many practice tests you do. It doesn't matter how many courses you do It doesn't matter what you do You will not increase your reading score unless you do all four of these things So let's talk about what these four things are. So the first thing you need is you need a strategy for each Question Type so for example, you might have a true false not given question or you might have a matching headings question and these two questions are testing different sub skills and Require a very different strategy for each of these two different types of questions now the problem is is that many students will learn a strategy and Then go and do a practice test or some practice questions And then what they'll say is your strategy does not work Well, that is a problem with your overall approach not with the strategy Because your goal is not to look at the strategy once it is to master the strategy So the key thing that you need to do at this stage is master The strategy So what does master mean master means that you could teach that strategy to someone else If someone asked you what is the strategy for true false not given you wouldn't have to look at your notes You wouldn't have to check anything you would be able to tell them Oh step one you do this step two you do this step three you do this step four you do this and you can tell Somewhat automatically what to do in other words on test day You were able to look at a true false not given question or a matching headings question or a multiple choice question and Do this strategy automatically without even thinking about it The problem is is that if you look at a strategy, but you haven't really mastered it that strategy is useless Your wheel here your tire is broken. So that brings us on to the second part, which is practice tests So what a lot of students believe is if they do more practice tests their score will increase Well, this is not true. So what you need to do is is approach practice tests a little bit differently Your goal here first is just to have a first goal, which is to master The strategies so this means that you take a step-by-step strategy and You take some practice questions and you take as long as you want time does not matter here What matters is you mastering the step-by-step strategy. So if it takes you One and a half hours or two hours or three hours just to do one practice test. That is absolutely fine The mistake that a lot of students make is that they look at a strategy and then they do a practice test under exam conditions They don't get the score that they need and then they get very frustrated And they blame the strategy or they blame themselves and they start to think I'm not good enough and I'm going to fail this test I hate this test And then they give up you don't need to feel that way So first of all you take the strategy and you apply it to practice tests and take as much time as you want Because you're just trying to master that strategy take as much time as you want Think about what you're doing and then once you are comfortable using the strategies You can use the practice tests for goal number two Goal number two is do it under exam conditions because you're just trying to find out your weakness So you're going to do a weakness analysis In other words, you're looking at your mistakes What mistakes are you making and are there any patterns to these? So that takes us on to the third thing here, which is Mistakes or weakness Analysis so you're going to think deeply about each mistake and the reason why you're doing this is you are trying to establish any Patterns, are there any common reasons why you are getting a low score? So for example, if we have a look over here at our mistakes Let's say you get ten questions wrong and eight of them are spelling So you got eight out of ten wrong just because of spelling errors Or you might find that you got confused about the strategy for a particular question or You might have worked out that you couldn't find the correct answer because you didn't understand some of the words It was a vocabulary issue or it could be a skills issue For example, you find it difficult to find the location of the correct word That would be a scanning issue or you find it very difficult to understand general meaning That would be a skimming issue or it could be a particular type of question For example, every time you do a true false not given question You really struggle with that particular type of question or every time you do multiple choice questions You really struggle with that particular type of question and if you never do this Again, you will have a busted tire and it doesn't matter how good everything else is It doesn't matter how good of a car you have if you have one busted tire You are not going anywhere that car is completely useless. You will not go anywhere Your score will not increase until you follow this system But that is not the end of it once we understand what our weaknesses are what our common mistakes are Let's say you look and you see that vocabulary is an issue and True false not given questions are an issue. You cannot just stop there You wouldn't believe the number of students that we work with even we work with one-on-one and we tell them the only reason why your reading score is not increasing is because of vocabulary and This particular type of question and then they do nothing They go and do the test and then they fail. You don't want to be one of these students What you want to do next is work on your weak Areas so we want to take our weak area and we want to convert that weak area into a strength So for example, we want to improve our vocabulary or improve our ability to answer true false not given questions So we're acting more like a sniper than with a shotgun. It's a sniper approach We're not focusing on everything We're just focusing on one or two weaknesses But you must use these four things and you must use them in order and then that brings us on to our last part Whoops, which is all about time So every time I explain this to a student what the student will normally say is I don't have time to do all of this Chris, can you not just give me some quick tips and that's going to really increase my score? No, because there are no quick tips that are going to increase your score so I had a recent student a VIP student and she was a pharmacist All right. So I said imagine I come into your pharmacy with a headache. So this is me With my headache I'm not very happy because I've got a headache and I say can you give me some drugs? Can you give me some medicine to cure my headache and she is a great pharmacist? So she gives me some paracetamol to improve my headache Imagine I come back five minutes later and say your paracetamol your medicine doesn't work because I still Have a headache what would you say and she said I would think that you were being very unreasonable and very difficult Yes Certain things take time. All right. So if you have two students imagine we have two students and one student Let's say today is June 1st and they book their test for July 1st And they want to get everything done as quickly as possible in 30 days then we have another student so today is June 1st and Instead of thinking about booking the test what they do is they just focus on The process They just focus on doing step one and then step two and then step three and then step four This student is going to get the scores They need in the quickest possible time This student will probably fail because they're trying to do everything as quickly as possible Like to go back to our car analogy This person if they have a flat tire it is probably going to take them, you know like 30 minutes To change the tire, but if they want to get everything done in five minutes Then their car is going nowhere and they're just going to be very very frustrated This is what happens with students who fail the test over and over and over again Because they're trying to do everything as quickly as possible Instead of doing things the right way if you follow this system You are going to see great results But if you miss one of these steps and you don't master the strategies you don't Find out what your weaknesses are and you don't work on your weaknesses. Then you are going to fail. So just to recap Get some strategies that actually work that have been proven to work and master them so that you can use them automatically On the test master means that you could teach someone what those strategies are without looking at any notes then do a weakness analysis on your practice tests and then Work on those weaknesses find out what why you are getting a low score and then turn those weaknesses into strength