Skimming and Scanning are the two very essential aspects of IELTS Reading Test, but, if you don’t really know the technique to use the two, you’ll end up making your exam a blunder.
Skimming
The purpose of skimming is to get the main ideas or gist of the text before you look at the questions. You can also do this by reading a large section of the passage quickly in order to get the main context or topic on what the text is about.
How to skim an article?
Skimming is not a difficult technique to follow and if you learn to master it perfectly, understanding our second skill, scanning, becomes very easy to learn.
So here’s how you skim:
• When you get an article in your IELTS paper, don’t just read the questions already, but first, you read the whole passage in bits and pieces to understand what the main topic in the text is.
• Underline any sentence, word or keyword that you think is important. Remember, the main purpose of this skill is to understand the gist, so there’s no wrong or write keywords, you only have to mark what you think is related to the main concept within the text.
Points to keep in mind while skimming
• Don’t read the questions before you skim.
If you do so, you’ll not be able to read the text with a fresh perspective and you’ll only try to look for answers, which can go wrong. But if you skim first and then read the passage then you’ll be able to scan the answers easily.
• Skim the whole passage, not just the first lines of a paragraph
At times, the texts’ main idea is hidden between the paragraphs or in the last paragraphs, therefore you must read the entire text quickly. If you don’t want to read it completely, just take a glance at some repetitive words or synonyms. These words can indicate what the main idea of the text could be.
Scanning
Scanning is the most important skill used to discover all the answers in the IELTS Reading test. The technique is not difficult, and you can learn it easily at home in days, but you need to learn to read quickly.
How to scan a text?
It practically not possible for you to read everything in your IELTS reading exam in only 60 minutes. You’ll have three texts to read and 40 questions to answer, which is why it becomes all the more important to learn to scan.
There are no two ways of scanning text, you just to do two things while scanning an article, but, very quickly:
• When you’re reading, don’t read the text, just hover or move your eyes over it and look a piece of specific information or keywords. It could be names, numbers, dates or any keyword from the questions.
• Remember when we said, don’t read the questions before skimming, well, here’s the answer to that. Because you must read the question BEFORE scanning the article.
• When you’ve read the questions, finding keywords related to those questions will become much easier. Just take a look at the article and circle anything that is related to that keyword.
• After you’ve found all the keywords, just read the question again, and each sentence with a circled word. And finally, when you have the right answer, note it down in your own words.
Remember, you must practice scanning a lot before test day, train yourself to scan a text using various IELTS practice tests and IELTS preparation books. You can also practice scanning with newspapers, magazines, books and comprehension texts.
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