 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. So the good news is, is that not all of these tips are actually going to lower your score. The reading tips and tricks on YouTube are actually much much better than the ones I find for speaking and writing. Some of them are actually very very good, but some of them are not. Let's start off with one of the good ones. So if you type into YouTube IELTS reading tips and tricks, the first video that comes up is this one, 15 reading tips for IELTS academic. This is by E2 IELTS 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 more than 10 different types of question on the reading test? So if we go to the IDP website, 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 tasks, 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 Council 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 sub skills. 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 high quality 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 experienced 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. So the first most popular reading tip was very good, and this will improve your score. One of the most popular videos on YouTube is one by IELTS-Liz called IELTS 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 eight 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, IELTS 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, IELTS Reading, True, False, Not Given, tips and tricks. And the videos that come up 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 a clickbait video, after a clickbait video, all telling you the same thing that you could have understood in five 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 are going to really struggle with the writing test because you are watching all of these fake guru's videos. Quite simply, if you're watching confusing information, your brain is going to be full of confusing information. If you want me just to simplify this for you, again, at the end of this video, I'll give you a step-by-step system that you can use for True, False, Not Given questions that has resulted in a huge number of our students getting a band nine in the IELTS reading test. Just wait until the end, watch that, apply it to real questions and stop giving these gurus your attention. 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. IELTS reading tips and tricks, how I got a band eight. So you'll see lots of people who got a band eight 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 band eight actually impressive on the writing test? So I'm not gonna give you my opinion, I'm just gonna 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 IELTS experts. So band eight in the reading test is slightly above average for the average person. For an IELTS teacher who claims to be an IELTS expert, band eight is actually terrible. 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. Because if their strategy was really effective, they wouldn't be getting slightly above average scores, would they? 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 experienced 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 sub skills 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 sub skill. 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 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 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 band nine. They wouldn't be getting 7.5 or a band eight. 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 IELTS YouTube and in IELTS books and in every IELTS classroom in the world but it is one of the most misunderstood areas of IELTS reading. To demonstrate, let's look at a video that has nearly 5 million views called IELTS 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 IELTS test it states in order to help you decrease the amount of time it takes to complete the reading section of the IELTS 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 Cullen's article on Cambridge.org, she says every question has one clear purpose to force you to use specific reading skills. So telling 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 IELTS 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 IELTS 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 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. Telling students that all you have to do is just skim and scan and you can just use one strategy for any question. That really helps get YouTube clicks but it doesn't really help improve IELTS reading scores. So those are the four most common IELTS reading tips and tricks. Some good, some not so good and some terrible. 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 IELTS reading score through using techniques and strategies that actually work and have worked for thousands of our IELTS VIP students. So pick one of these. Thank you.