IELTS Reading: Building Vocabulary

Study Notes

Importance of vocabulary in IELTS reading:
- Accounts for 30-40% of the total marks
- Helps to improve reading speed and comprehension
Strategies for building vocabulary:
- Learn prefixes, suffixes, and roots to decode unfamiliar words
- Read widely to encounter new words in context
- Use flashcards or vocabulary apps to memorize words
- Practice active recall by trying to define words without looking at the meanings
Focus on learning:
- High-frequency vocabulary (common words and phrases)
- Academic vocabulary (words related to academic topics)
- Collocations (words that frequently appear together)

Importance of identifying main ideas:
- Helps to understand the overall meaning of the passage
- Essential for answering multiple-choice questions
Strategies for identifying main ideas:
- Read the title, headings, and subheadings to understand the topic and structure
- Identify the topic sentence (usually the first sentence of a paragraph)
- Look for keywords and phrases that indicate the main idea
- Skim and scan the passage to identify supporting details
Techniques for identifying main ideas:
- Identify the author's purpose (e.g., to persuade, inform, describe)
- Recognize the tone and attitude of the author
- Identify the main idea of each paragraph and how they relate to each other

Vocabulary accounts for 30-40% of total marks in IELTS reading
Building vocabulary improves reading speed and comprehension
Learn prefixes, suffixes, and roots to decode unfamiliar words
Read widely to encounter new words in context
Use flashcards or vocabulary apps to memorize words
Practice active recall by trying to define words without looking at the meanings
Focus on learning high-frequency vocabulary, academic vocabulary, and collocations

Types of Multiple Choice Questions
- Distractor-based questions: one correct answer and multiple distractors (incorrect options)
- True/false questions: two options, true or false, to determine the correctness of a statement
- Best answer questions: multiple correct answers, but one is the best or most correct response
- Category-based questions: options are grouped into categories, and the correct answer is a category
- Roman numeral questions: options are labeled with Roman numerals, and the correct answer is a combination of them

Item Difficulty: measures how difficult a question is for a group of test-takers, reported as a p-value (proportion of correct responses)
Item Discrimination: measures how well a question distinguishes between high and low achievers, reported as a point-biserial correlation coefficient

Cognitive Complexity: the level of cognitive processing required to answer the question
Knowledge Complexity: the amount of knowledge required to answer the question
Language Complexity: the complexity of the language used in the question
Contextual Complexity: the complexity of the context in which the question is presented

Grammar-based MCQs test knowledge of grammar rules, sentence structure, and word usage.
Error identification MCQs require identifying errors in sentences, such as subject-verb agreement, tense consistency, and modifier placement.
Sentence completion MCQs involve completing incomplete sentences with the correct grammatical structure.

Parts of speech include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions.
Tense and aspect include present, past, and future simple, continuous, and perfect verb tenses.
Clause and phrase structure involve independent and dependent clauses, phrases, and sentence fragments.
Modifier placement requires correct placement of adjectives and adverbs in sentences.
Subject-verb agreement ensures subject and verb agreement in number (singular or plural) and person (first, second, or third).

Read the question carefully to identify the task and what is being asked.
Read the sentence carefully to identify the grammatical structure and any errors.
Eliminate distractors by identifying and eliminating obviously incorrect options.
Choose the best answer by selecting the option that best completes the sentence or corrects the error.