Increase your sentence reading speed
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- Written by IELTS Mentor
The faster and more accurately you read, the more questions you will be able to answer. In all the tests, the instructions, the examples, and the questions themselves need to be read quickly and must be well understood in order for you to have more time to find the answers. It pays to increase your overall reading speed.
You need faster reading skills to be able to answer all the questions in your reading test. Here are some general techniques that the successful IELTS test takers use to read faster and search for answers from the reading passages:
Read a group of words at a time:
To increase your reading speed, you must learn to read in groups of words that form logical units of thought within sentences. If you read each word in a sentence one at a time, you will read very slowly and most likely misunderstand the meaning of much of what you read. So read your sentences in phrases by considering all the words of a phrase as a single unit.
Scan for information:
Scanning is the method to use when you need to search a page quickly for information that you require. You may be looking for the general idea of the information on the page (skim quickly through the information), or you may wish to scan for specific information. In either case, the method is to sweep your eyes across the page slowly and smoothly, starting at the top left, and working your way across and down the page in a wavelike motion.
Practice as much as you can:
There's no “instant remedy” when it comes to augmenting one’s reading speed. It takes time to master this skill. Time and practice are the keys here. So, people who can read faster than most others have been practising this for a long. If you think you can learn the techniques of speed reading in a few hours, you are wrong. So be patient and read as much as you can. Read books, newspapers and journals that seem interesting.
Gum Reading:
At the beginning of this exercise, take up whatever you want to read. Now, chew a gum while you read. This method will ensure you don't speak the words aloud while reading. This method is particularly helpful as it builds a habit of reading silently. Silent reading is directly related to the speed reading. While reading, if you speak each word aloud, you are likely to take more time to finish reading it.
Visual Pacing:
You can use a pencil as a pacer to practise this technique. To control the visual sweep of the saccadic movement of your eyeballs, move the pencil faster and at a speedy pace. Do not underline the lines. This would help you read much faster after a while.
Here is a list of resources you can use to increase your reading speed.
10 Ways to Increase Your Reading Speed
How I Learned to Read 300 Percent Faster in 20 Minutes
4 Simple Ways to Increase Your Reading Speed
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