Reading Tips - Toefel

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Reading Tips - Toefel

The best way to improve reading skills is to read frequently and to read many different types of texts in various subject areas (sciences, social sciences, arts, business, etc.). The Internet is one of the best resources for this, but books, magazines, and journals are very helpful as well. It is best to progress to reading textsthat are more academic in style, the kind that would be found in university courses.

Here are some suggestions for ways to build skills for the three reading purposes included in TOEFL iBT.

1. Reading to fi nd information
• Scan the passages to fi nd and highlight key facts (dates, numbers, terms) and information.
• Practice this frequently to increase reading rate and fluency.

2. Reading for basic comprehension
• Increase vocabulary knowledge, perhaps by using fl ashcards.
• Rather than carefully reading each word and each sentence, practice skimming a passage quickly
to get a general impression of the main idea.
• Build up the ability to skim quickly and to identify the major points.
• After skimming a passage, read it again more carefully and write down the main idea, major points, and important facts.
• Choose some unfamiliar words in the passage and guess the meaning from the context (surrounding sentences).
• Select all the pronouns (he, him, they, them, etc.) in a passage and identify which nouns they refer to in the passage.
• Practice making inferences and drawing conclusions based on what is implied in the passage as a whole.

3. Reading to learn
• Identify the passage type (e.g., classifi cation, cause-and-effect, compare-and-contrast, problemand-
solution, description, narration, etc.)
• Do the following to organize the information in the passage:
• Create an outline of the passage to distinguish between major and minor points.
• If the passage describes the order of a process or is a narration, create an outline of the steps in the process or narration. (See outline example on page 45.)
• If the passage categorizes information, create a chart and place the information in appropriate categories. 

Note: In the TOEFL iBT test, test takers do
not have to create such a chart. Instead, a chart with possible answer choices is provided for them, and they are required to fi ll in the chart with the correct choices. Practicing this skill will help test takers think about categorizing information, and be able to do so with ease