 Hi everyone, Chris here from IELTS Advantage with lesson three of our band seven or above IELTS Reading mini course. So all through this week we've produced a band seven or above mini course on reading. So this is lesson three and if you haven't watched lessons two and one, definitely go back after you watch this and watch lessons one and two because they all kind of connect together. So let's get going with lesson three. So before we get into it, let's just recap on what we did this week. So on Monday we looked at lesson one, which is the key factors that will get you a seven or above in reading and vocabulary and how important vocabulary is and how to improve your vocabulary. So if you haven't watched that, go back and have a look. Lesson two, which we did on Wednesday was all about the different reading skills, how to use them, some skills that you might not be aware of, what they are, how to use them on test day. So that's really, really important as well. And then unless or today and Friday, we are looking at strategy and we can summarize the whole course by looking at this. So what we looked at on Monday was most students are looking for tips and tricks and hacks and shortcuts. So that it's really tempting to think that these are going to work. But the reason why they don't work and the reason why students fail a lot is because they ignore the things that are a lot more important. The most important is mindset and we'll be looking a lot at the end of this lesson. We'll be looking at why that is so important. Vocabulary, if your vocabulary is not at a certain level, you're not going to be able to get a score that you want. Skills that we did yesterday, if you're unsure about how to use those skills, what they are and what order to use them. And most importantly, that you are practicing those skills and improving those skills on a daily basis. You're going to really struggle. And today we're going to look at strategy, how to have a step by step strategy for all the different types of questions, how these can help you. And we're going to do a little demo today. So this is going to be an interactive lesson. So if you are watching live, get ready to post in the comments your answers. And we're going to help you out with that. And that's really going to help you activate the knowledge that you have learned this week. So why strategy? Why not just go into the test like most people do and with no strategy whatsoever? So this is a good quote. A fool with a plan is better off than a genius without one. And this is really, really applicable to not only the IELTS reading test, but the writing test, the speaking test and the listening test. You could get two students of, let's say they are identical twins and they've had exactly the same experience. And their English level is exactly the same. But one of them has a plan and the other one doesn't have a plan. One of them has a strategy and the other one, it doesn't have a strategy. The one that does have a plan, one that plans out everything, thinks in a strategic way about everything and prepares in a strategic way and does the questions on the reading test in a strategic way. I would bet that that student is going to get a higher score than the one that doesn't. The other reason why you need a strategy for the reading test is there are so many different types of reading question. Matching information, true, false, not given, yes, no, not given. Matching heading, short answer, matching names, diagram, labeling, matching sentences, summary completion, multiple choice questions and on and on. There are even more than that. So why do they have so many of these questions? Like when you are learning to read in school, they might have just given you some multiple choice questions or some comprehension questions. Why are they giving you all of these different types of questions? Well, think about why you are doing the IELTS test. You are doing the IELTS test and the reading test specifically to prove that when you move to an English speaking country, move to London or Toronto or wherever you want to move to, that you will be able to understand English when you are reading it. And reading is not just testing one small thing that multiple choice questions or comprehension questions, you are going to be tested in a variety of ways. So that's what the test does and it tests different skills, different sub skills. So you need to be aware of these. So because these are all testing different skills and different sub skills or in different formats, you need a different strategy for all of these different types of questions. You need to understand what these questions are. You need to be able to have a strategy for them, learn that strategy, apply it to questions and learn from your mistakes and get better using that strategy. Other reasons why you should use a step-by-step strategy because many of you will look at this and think like that's just way too much work. I just want to get a band seven or I just want to get a band eight. I don't want to do all of this. Can you not just teach me one strategy for all of the different types of questions? Well, no, because there's so many benefits to having a step-by-step strategy for each type of question. Number one, it's a proven framework. So I'm not saying my strategies are the only strategies to use. There are other ones and there's variations on other ones as well. I'm not saying mine are the best or anything like that. But what I will say is the students that I work with on my course and who use these strategies, they get high scores. We've helped thousands of students get the scores that they need and these strategies do work. So you don't have to use mine. You could use another teacher's but make sure you trust that teacher and that teacher knows what they're doing and they judge them on their results, not what they tell you in their marketing. Number two, practice in a standardized way. So this is important because you want to practice in the same way over and over again when it comes to reading. So one of the key things you'll be doing during your practice is looking at your mistakes, analyzing your mistakes and thinking about why you got those questions wrong. So if you're using a standardized strategy, it's taking out one of the variables that could be going wrong. If you're using that standardized strategy, you know that strategy was not the problem. Maybe you haven't learned it effectively yet. That could be a problem. Just practicing in a standardized way removes one of those variables to worry about. And it also means that if you practice in a standardized way, you know exactly what to do on test day. On test day, you're going to have a million different things to think about and worry about. Why not make one thing how to answer the reading questions with strategy for that one less thing that you have to worry about. And then you can just focus on finding the answers and then you can move on and get the score that you need hopefully. It also saves a huge amount of time. A lot of the strategies, the reason why they exist and the whole reasoning behind them is to save you time and to make sure that you get everything done on time. And the reading, listening, and the writing test, time is always a factor. So if you can be more efficient on test day and more efficient when you're practicing, all the better. So hopefully that convinces you why you should have strategies for all of these different types of questions. Okay, so what we're going to do now is we're going to look at a step-by-step strategy for matching headings. Now, what I've done is I've taken just the most important essential elements of the strategy. The one that I teach my students is a little bit more complicated, has a few more things added to it. But for the purposes of this lesson, I've just stripped it down to the essential things. So we're going to look at a step-by-step strategy for matching headings. So you have to find this is just the strategy for matching headings. It is unique for matching headings. The ones for this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, they're all different. So don't look at this one and think, I'll just apply this to every question. No, that's thinking about it in completely the wrong way. So please don't do that and then email me in a month saying you failed your test. That's not what we're doing here. So how would we go about matching headings? So what I'm going to do is look at this and explain why we do these things. So as we said, each of the different types of question, they're different. So the first thing we're going to do here is skim the text first. So some questions you're going to look at the text first. Some questions you're going to look at the questions or the options first. For matching headings, you're being tested on your ability to understand general meaning. That's the most important thing that you're going to do and understand the general meaning of each paragraph you're going to skim so you're not going to scan. So again, coming down to do you understand these skills? Do you know how to use them? So skimming the text first is going to really, really help you understand the whole text. And if you're doing this question, if you see this question on the paper, do this one first because it will enable you to understand the general meaning of the whole text and that will really help you with this subsequent question. So if you have true, false, not given after or multiple choice or something like that, it will help you do that. So again, it's about being strategic, about thinking, about what skills to use, about what is the best way for me to use my time on test day. And what we're going to do when we skim the text and skimming doesn't mean just read the first line and the last line. It means read the whole thing quite quickly. What we're going to do to help us understand the general meaning is we're going to create our own heading for each paragraph. The reason why I get students to do this is for two reasons. When you tell a student to skim, they will read it very, very quickly but not really think about the meaning. And a lot of students think skimming just means reading quickly. Skimming means reading quickly to get the general meaning. So a lot of people will leave the second part out. They will read quickly but not really understand the general meaning. So if you do that, you're wasting your time. You may as well not have done it. So, you know, some strategies will get you to do stuff but they're actually wasting your time. There's no reason to do those things. So what we're going to do is create our own headings and that will force us to really understand what we're doing. Another thing with skimming is many students read too quickly. So skimming doesn't mean read as quickly as possible. It means, you know, read quite quickly. That's difficult to say, read quite quickly in order to get the general meaning of what's happening. So that will force you to do that. The other reason, the second reason why we do this is it helps us find the correct answer because a lot of the time, not every single time, but a lot of the time when you create your own heading, then step two, read the headings. They will match up, if not exactly, nearly exactly the same. So do you think that's the correct answer? Most likely it is. So, second one, read the headings. So we're not reading the headings first or we're skimming the text first, then we're reading the headings but we're not trying to find the correct answer yet. What we're doing is we're understanding those headings. So if you don't understand the headings, you won't be able to match them. It's pretty simple. And highlight any keywords or any information in those headings that will help you match up. So we're not matching up yet. Number three, we're matching up. We're matching the most obvious headings. The ones that you've created your own and are the same or nearly the same. So what this is doing, what this step is doing is it's helping us with time and being a bit more strategic about how we're doing the question. Because let's say there are four possible answers and two of them match immediately. That means that has cut your workload by 50%. And the ones that are a little bit more difficult, you'll be able to focus all of your time on that and be able to hopefully figure out the correct answer in a more efficient, strategic way. So yeah, so as you can see, these strategies, we don't just wake up in the morning and think, what can we put together? What can we just throw together to satisfy students? Each step is thought out. Each step is there for a reason. So if you're working with your teacher and they are giving you strategies, a great way to learn from them is ask the teacher, why do we do this step? Why do we do this second one? Why do we do that instead of that? And the teacher should be able to explain that to you. And by understanding it, you'll be able to absorb it and use it better during practice and on test day. So number four, right possible heading. So let's say we have answered two out of the four options and we're left with two other options. The two options that we're unsure about, we're not 100% about, write possible headings beside the remaining paragraphs. All right, so try and match those up and look at the paragraph and look at the headings and then you'll be able to look in detail. So now we're switching from skimming to close reading. So we're looking at it in a lot of detail. We're looking at the paragraph, we're not skimming it, and we're trying to understand the general meaning and match that to the heading. And then we need to make a conclusion. You have to decide an answer and move on to the next one. All right, have the confidence to conclude and move on to the next one. And by that strategy, it is going to help you. But the number one thing to remember is you can't just read this and immediately improve to a band seven. That's not how it works. You need to put it into practice. I can't watch Barcelona this weekend and watch the best footballers in the world and then become an amazing footballer. Maybe if I watch them and try to do the things they do over and over and over and over again, they would improve as a footballer. But unless you do the thing, you're not going to be able to improve. So what we're going to do now is I'm going to show you two paragraphs. So we're going to replicate on Facebook Live what we would do on test day. So what I need is participation from you guys. And in the comments, what you're going to do you're going to tell me the heading of the paragraph. Because remember, we're going to create our own headings. So I'm going to show you two paragraphs and I'm going to ask you to create your own heading. So just one sentence. If you had to create a heading for this paragraph, what would you write and put it in the comments? So take two minutes, take three minutes to read it quite quickly. So probably wouldn't be spending that amount of time, but it is a demo. It's not the real test. So we'll give you, let's say, two minutes. And then what we'll ask you to do is decide the answer based on four options that we have here. There's a bit of a delay with Facebook. So it's getting shorter, is it? So it should be okay though. But we're doing this live so forgive us if there's a bit of a delay. What I want you to do, so this is from the New York Times. It is a movie review from the New York Times and about Mary Poppins. Take two minutes, read that. You should be able to see it, yeah? Read that and create a title for that paragraph. I'll give you two minutes to do that, to come up with your own title. Okay, one more minute. And write your title below. It doesn't have to be anything complicated. Just keep it simple. The first thing that you can think of, don't get lost in the words you don't understand. Just read it very, very quickly. Remember, we're skimming it and try and write something. And don't be shy about making a mistake or anything like that. Everybody makes mistakes. I'll be check. First person, let's write your answer down. So we have melody song. A lot of you are saying disappointment, of song, anything else? Sign track. I can't write all your ideas down, but I'll write a few of them down. Try and get a power of song, song review. Good. Okay. So now, very good. Well done. And you'll see lots and lots and lots of other suggestions in the comments. We're going to do one more, and then we'll look at four options, four headings. So we'll look at this one. So again, try and do this one a little bit quicker. Not because I want the video to finish quicker, but remember you're skimming. You're not looking at things in too much detail. Okay, quick, not too quick, not too slow. Okay, 30 seconds. Remember, you're doing it as quickly as you can. You're not reading in too much detail. Don't get lost in any of the vocabulary you don't know. Okay, and write your ideas now. What, if you had to write one title for this paragraph, what would you write? Okay, so we have some ideas here. Improvement of character. About Mary Poppins. A lot of you are saying fighting for rights to improve character comparison. So interestingly, some of these are about character, and some of them are about, a lot of you said, like fighting for your rights and stuff like that. So you probably just looked here. A lot of you maybe have just looked here and seen one thing fighting for your rights and picked up on that. So is this the general meaning of the whole paragraph, or is this just one part of the paragraph? What is the overall meaning? Is it about character? We don't know, let's find out. So, here are four options. And I know this is not the real test. Do not comment, like in the real test we wouldn't do this. This is a lesson. It's not a mock test or anything like that. So, looking at what you thought were the titles, looking at these four options, match four or two of these out of the four to the paragraph. So let's start off with paragraph one. So I'll give you a second just to read these. So, how the movie compares to the original, performances of the actors, a review of the soundtrack, the screenplay is purely written. So this is something that might be very, very obvious. So when you use this technique, some of them will be really, really obvious. Some of them not so obvious. Remember, we don't use this technique to get 100% of them immediately correct. That would be way too easy, but it's about being strategic and helping us as much as possible. So let's have a look here. Out of the four, song review, melody song, disappointment with a song, comparing the soundtrack, the power of song, all of these titles that you came up with, are there any out of the four that are very, very obvious? Let's have a look and let's have a look at your... So this one is paragraph one. Okay, so let's have a look at the other one. Character comparison, improvement of character, story about Mary Poppins fighting for rights, how to improve character, any here. So how the movie compares to the original, unsure, there could be that one. Performances of the actors, does character mean the same as actors but the performances of that? Probably not, it's probably not that one. The screenplay is purely written. Screenplay could be about character. So who decides on the character, the people writing the screenplay? So it could be this one. So what will we do now? Let's go back to the strategy. So match most obvious headings. We've done that already. Write possible headings beside remaining paragraphs and close reading. So let's go back here. Let's delete this. So let's delete these ones because these ones don't really help us, okay? So let's delete them. And what we're going to do now is have a look. So how movie compares to the original? That's the first one. So we'd write this beside it. So that's the first one. And then the other one is screenplay is purely written. Now what we can do is we're not going to be skimming this, we're not going to be scanning this, we're going to be looking at it in more detail to find out which one of these two is the correct answer. So also you have to remember original. Original. Also what you have to remember is vocabulary. How is your vocabulary? So you need to understand what original means. You need to understand what screenplay means, okay? So if you don't understand what these mean, then you can't compare it to this. So when we were talking about earlier on this week, when we were talking about how important vocabulary is, now you're starting to see why. And then there's also a lot of vocabulary in here that is going to be a little bit tricky. Let's have a look here. Warbling. Militantly. Suffragette. Even something like this, even something like this. So unless you are aware of what these mean, then you're going to struggle a little bit. So improving your vocabulary is going to help. So screenplay. Is there anything about the screenplay here? Let's have a look in a little bit more detail. Let me know in the comments. What do you think? Is there anything about the screenplay? Not really, but does that mean that we can automatically, whoops, choose this one? No. How a movie compares to the original. So we need to make a hundred percent. So again, we need to think about it a little bit more carefully. So if we have a look here, let's put this in green. Notably in the 1964 movie, they're that way and did not approve of this improvement to the character. So it's more about talking about the differences between the 1964 movie, which is the original movie, and this present movie. That's where the general meaning of the whole paragraph. So then we can tick, we can pick that one. So hopefully you can see that by being a little bit more strategic about things, it helps us find the correct answer and helps us find the correct answer a little bit more efficiently. So let's have a look. So all of you seem to be on the right track. Excellent. Okay. So as you can see, most of you were able to do that, but most of you, if you did the test today, a lot of you would get those questions wrong because you're not able to apply that strategy. You have to learn it. So let's have a look. Now to recap what we did this week. So at the start of the week, we talked about why most students are looking for tips and tips are not going to help you. We looked at vocabulary. We demonstrated that again today, why that's so important. We looked at skills. We also demonstrated why that is really important to understand what skimming is and how to use it and to practice it and scanning and close reading. And we looked at strategy today, but the most important one and the one that we haven't really talked about that much this week is mindset. So let's talk about that We could get two students, exactly the same students and they're given the exact same information. Let's say they join the same course and they get the exact same teacher and they look at the exact same online information. The information in this equation does not change. That variable in this equation does not change at all. This is also exactly the same. But one of them gets a seven or above and the other one gets below a seven. Why is that? Let's look at it in a little bit more detail. So here we have the person who got the score they needed and here we have the person who got the score that they weren't hoping for. Let's compare their mindset. So this student wants to learn things properly and they want to actually improve. They understand that the reading test is a reading test and they need to improve their reading. They need to improve their reading skills, their strategy, their vocabulary. They need to improve. This student just wants tips and tricks. That's all they're interested in, just tips and tricks. Number two, this student knows that it's going to take time in order to improve. They can't do it immediately. They also know that it's going to take effort. It's going to take hard work. They're going to actually have to do the things that they have been taught. Watching YouTube videos or videos on Facebook is not work. It's not effort. That's only part of it. Number two, the unsuccessful student, let's call them, they want it now. They want it immediately. They want all the problems solved in a YouTube video. They want all the problems solved in a blog post that's 50 words long. They think that there's some sort of secret that they're going to learn from a blog post that's going to solve all of their problems. Number three, the happy student, the one that got the scores they need, they're aware of their weaknesses. They're aware of the different things that are important. They are aware of how important vocabulary is and strategy is and the skills are. They're aware of how to use those things and how to prepare them. Just the unhappy student is not aware of any of these things. They're clueless. They're going in and they're doing the test over and over and over again and being like, why did I fail? So if you're doing the same thing over and over again, is anything going to change? No. Number four, strategic. The happy student is strategic not only about with their preparation but what they're doing on test day. They believe in luck and they believe in hope. These are the two most dangerous words that can ever come out of your mouth. When people say, I hope I'm lucky next time, pretty much guaranteed they're going to feel. Luck and hope has nothing to do with it. It's about these things, about learning what to do, doing it properly, putting the effort in, becoming aware of what you need to do and doing those things. Number five, the happy student learns from their mistakes and sees their mistakes as an opportunity to improve. Every single mistake that they make, they're like, this is great, I can analyse this mistake and learn from it so I don't make it in the future. Number five, the unhappy student just quits. They give up on moving to the country of their dreams, getting the job of their dreams. They're like, oh it's all so difficult and it's all somebody else's fault when it's nobody else's fault but theirs. So the key here, the key variable is mindset. All right, same person with the same information with different mindset. One's going to get a seven or above, one's going to get below a seven. One thing that you can learn that I'll teach you, that we teach our VIP students, when it comes to not only reading, but it really, really is applicable to reading, is this flywheel, all right. These are things that you need to be doing and these reinforce each other. So in order to learn something, first you need to learn what to do. So this is what you've been doing this week, watching these three lessons. If you haven't watched the other lessons, go back and watch them. You need to learn what to do first. Then you need to do those things. So most people watching this video will watch it and say that was really, really good and then do nothing about it. You need to put it into action. There are no books on how to drive a car better. How do you learn how to drive a car? You do it. I'm sure there are some books that show you how to do that, but you need to get behind the wheel and do those things. But just doing it is not really going to help you. You need to get feedback on what you're doing. The driving analogy is really good. Do you learn how to drive a car by driving by yourself? Hopefully not, because you'll probably kill someone. You have someone sitting beside you, constantly giving you feedback saying you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong, fix it. And by doing that, you're going to learn even more and then you're going to be able to do it again, get more feedback, learn even more. That's one thing that we do with our students and one of the reasons why we have more success stories than any other miles course in the world, because it does work. Some courses just teach you to learn things, like most YouTube channels. Some people just provide practice materials, which is useless, because without feedback, you're not going to actually learn anything in the first place. So, if you only learn one thing from this week, learn that. And that's really, really going to help you. So, thank you very much for watching these lessons. And that's it for the reading stuff that we're doing this week. Hopefully, you find it useful. Please give me your feedback in the comments. Let me know what you thought about these lessons, lessons one, two and three. Did they help you? Most of these would have just been about raising your awareness about the things that are going to cause you to feel and the things that are going to cause you to pass. I know there's no pass or no grade in IELTS, but there is you know, if you don't get the score you need, you're going to fail, basically. Okay, so let's have a look to see if there's any feedback or any questions. What are you saying? Can anyone give me information about this online course? Okay. So, what you can do is you can email me. Here's my email address, Chris at IELTSAdvantage.com If you need extra help if you need help doing these things and you need feedback on your work and you need someone to guide you and show you how to get the score you need, then you can email me if you want. So, send me an email and I'll be able to help you out. And if you have any other feedback or whether it's positive or negative feedback let me know in the comments. We read every comment. If you have a question, you can put it in the comments as well and we will try to get back to you as soon as we can. Thank you very much guys. Have a great weekend and to anyone doing their test tomorrow, good luck in your test. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.