How to improve your IELTS Listening and Reading?

Students often ask:

How to improve reading and listening skills?

The answer must be "read more and listen more".

However, this seems a bit cliché. In addition to the most basic "more practice", candidates also need to know how to practice and where to get useful reading and listening materials.

This article will tell you:

1. How to practice listening and reading
2. Choose appropriate reading and listening materials

1. How to practice Listening and Reading?

There are two methods of practicing listening and reading – Passive and Positive.

The former is the most common, but it is very ineffective, while the latter can significantly improve your abilities in a shorter amount of time.

Passive Listening means simply listening to English materials, such as IELTS questions, English songs, English news, etc., without doing anything else. In other words, when you are passively listening, you are not really thinking about the content you are hearing.

Passive Reading, similarly, means just reading something but not taking any steps to think or learn from what you are reading.

During Positive Listening, you engage in deeper thought about the content you are hearing, and the effect can be doubled. In active listening, you actively listen to new words in the material and guess their meanings based on the context, then jot these new words down in a notebook, and after the listening material is finished, look up the meanings of these words, and finally, look at the original text of the listening material and understand the original sentences by replacing these new words back into the text.

In Positive Reading, the pursuit is not quantity, but quality. When reading, there is no need to read the entire article in large chunks or many English materials every day. It is enough to read just one article per day and, while reading, pay close attention to the grammar (sentence structure) and some synonyms in the article. Then, try to use the sentence structures and synonyms from the article in that day's writing practice.

During exam preparation, turning passive into positive not only reduces the preparation time but also greatly improves the quality of revision.

Positive Listening

During Positive Listening, it's essential to pay attention to the following in the listening materials:

Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Grammar, Structure

However, it is not recommended to focus on all four aspects simultaneously while listening to the material for the first time. That would be quite difficult. It's better to focus first on the weakest aspect.

For example:

If you often make mistakes with singular and plural forms during IELTS listening, pay close attention to the singular and plural forms of each noun while listening.

Positive Reading

In Positive Reading, it's crucial to pay attention to the following in the reading materials:

Vocabulary, Grammar, Sentence Structure, Development of Ideas

Like positive listening, don't try to cover all four aspects at once, but start with your weakest area. This will not only improve your reading ability but also greatly help your writing skills.

• Vocabulary

1. Underline or note down any new words or phrases.
2. Re-read or listen to that part again and try to guess the meaning of the word/phrase.
3. Look up the meaning in a dictionary. (Don't skip the second step and go directly to this step)
4. Write the new word/phrase in a dedicated vocabulary notebook.
5. Add definitions, phonetic symbols, collocations, example sentences, synonyms, etc.
6. Review regularly.

• Grammar

1. Underline or note down any sentences you don't fully understand.
2. Think about why the author used that grammar structure and break down the structure.
3. Try to use this structure in speaking or writing.
4. Review regularly.

• Pronunciation

1. Choose 1 or 2 sentences containing some distinctive pronunciation features.
2. Listen to it several times.
3. Write down the sentence and mark pronunciation features, such as intonation; linking; weak forms; stress.
4. Try to imitate what the speaker is saying.

• Structure

1. Underline or note down some signal words (like Firstly, however, although, for example, etc.).
2. Pay attention to the function of the sentences and how the speaker/author uses these words to construct their speech/writing.
3. Try to use these words to construct your writing/speaking.

• Development of Ideas

1. Highlight the main sentence.
2. Observe how the author develops this main idea through explanation and examples.
3. Apply this method in your writing.

2. Find appropriate Listening and Reading Materials

Undoubtedly, the real IELTS Academic test questions are the best materials for listening and reading practice. However, we cannot treat doing practice questions as the only form of exercise. If we only focus on practicing questions, there's a high probability that we won't be able to transform passive learning into active learning.

Moreover, practicing with real questions can be very boring, and if that's all you do, you'll quickly find it dull and lose interest in learning. Therefore, during our review and exam preparation, the time spent on practicing questions should be about 20%, and the rest of the time should be dedicated to self-study, listening to, or reading materials that interest you.

If you're a fan of 'Harry Potter', for instance, you could use the original 'Harry Potter' movie as material for practicing active listening, and the original 'Harry Potter' books as materials for practicing active reading.

For listening materials, I recommend listening to more podcasts, such as TED Talks, BBC 6 Minute English, etc. These have a moderate pace, standard accents, and academic vocabulary, making them very suitable for listening training.