SKILL-SKILL TOEFL READING

Ø Using Reading Strategies

Language instructors are often frustrated by the fact that students do not automatically transfer the strategies they use when reading in their native language to reading in a language they are learning. Instead, they seem to think reading means starting at the beginning and going word by word, stopping to look up every unknown vocabulary item, until they reach the end. When they do this, students are relying exclusively on their linguistic knowledge, a bottom-up strategy. One of the most important functions of the language instructor, then, is to help students move past this idea and use top-down strategies as they do in their native language.

Effective language instructors show students how they can adjust their reading behavior to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and reading purposes. They help students develop a set of reading strategies and match appropriate strategies to each reading situation.

Strategies that can help students read more quickly and effectively include

• Previewing: reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions to get a sense of the structure and content of a reading selection
• Predicting: using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension; using knowledge of the text type and purpose to make predictions about discourse structure; using knowledge about the author to make predictions about writing style, vocabulary, and content
• Skimming and scanning: using a quick survey of the text to get the main idea, identify text structure, confirm or question predictions
• Guessing from context: using prior knowledge of the subject and the ideas in the text as clues to the meanings of unknown words, instead of stopping to look them up
• Paraphrasing: stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension by restating the information and ideas in the text

Instructors can help students learn when and how to use reading strategies in several ways.

• By modeling the strategies aloud, talking through the processes of previewing, predicting, skimming and scanning, and paraphrasing. This shows students how the strategies work and how much they can know about a text before they begin to read word by word.
• By allowing time in class for group and individual previewing and predicting activities as preparation for in-class or out-of-class reading. Allocating class time to these activities indicates their importance and value.
• By using cloze (fill in the blank) exercises to review vocabulary items. This helps students learn to guess meaning from context.
• By encouraging students to talk about what strategies they think will help them approach a reading assignment, and then talking after reading about what strategies they actually used. This helps students develop flexibility in their choice of strategies.

When language learners use reading strategies, they find that they can control the reading experience, and they gain confidence in their ability to read the language.

Ø Reading to Learn

Reading is an essential part of language instruction at every level because it supports learning in multiple ways.

• Reading to learn the language: Reading material is language input. By giving students a variety of materials to read, instructors provide multiple opportunities for students to absorb vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and discourse structure as they occur in authentic contexts. Students thus gain a more complete picture of the ways in which the elements of the language work together to convey meaning.
• Reading for content information: Students' purpose for reading in their native language is often to obtain information about a subject they are studying, and this purpose can be useful in the language learning classroom as well. Reading for content information in the language classroom gives students both authentic reading material and an authentic purpose for reading.
• Reading for cultural knowledge and awareness: Reading everyday materials that are designed for native speakers can give students insight into the lifestyles and worldviews of the people whose language they are studying. When students have access to newspapers, magazines, and Web sites, they are exposed to culture in all its variety, and monolithic cultural stereotypes begin to break down.

When reading to learn, students need to follow four basic steps:

1. Figure out the purpose for reading. Activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate reading strategies.
2. Attend to the parts of the text that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This selectivity enables students to focus on specific items in the input and reduces the amount of information they have to hold in short-term memory.
3. Select strategies that are appropriate to the reading task and use them flexibly and interactively. Students' comprehension improves and their confidence increases when they use top-down and bottom-up skills simultaneously to construct meaning.
4. Check comprehension while reading and when the reading task is completed. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect inconsistencies and comprehension failures, helping them learn to use alternate strategies.

Improving Your Reading Skills

1. Read as much and as often as possible. Make sure to include academic texts on a variety of topics written in different genres as part of your reading.
• Read major newspapers, such as The New York Times or Science Times.
• Use the websites of National Public Radio (NPR) or the BBC to get transcripts of shows and study the content and new vocabulary you encounter.
2. Continually expand your vocabulary knowledge.
• Develop a system for recording unfamiliar words.
• Write each word on a card and mix up the cards each time you study them. Write the context (the sentence the word was used in) to help you learn correct word usage.
• Group the words according to topic or meaning and study the words as a list of related words.
• Review the new words on a regular basis so that you remember them.
• Increase your vocabulary by analyzing word parts. Study roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
• Study word families (e.g., enjoyment, enjoy; enjoyable, enjoyably)
• Use available vocabulary resources.
• Use a good thesaurus to study various shades of meanings of words.
• The Longman Language Activator provides "collocations" (words used together).
• There are online concordancers that search corpora and provide examples of words in context, such as the British national corpus.
• Practice using context to guess the meaning of unknown words.
• Continually practice using new words you encounter in your speech and writing. This will help you remember both the meaning and the correct usage of the words.
3. Think carefully about how ideas are connected within a text. The connections between sentences and the links between paragraphs are critical to complete comprehension.
• To understand the structure of a reading passage, outline the text.
• Begin by determining the main idea or concept presented in each paragraph. Remember to distinguish between the main points and the details that exemplify them.
• Group paragraphs that address the same concept. Think about how the key idea in one paragraph relates to the main point of the next paragraph. If there are several paragraphs that focus on the same idea or concept, synthesize the key points into one main idea.
• Write one sentence or phrase summarizing the paragraphs that discuss the same idea.
• Add important details that support each major idea or concept.
• Learn to recognize different organizational styles in order to understand the way an article is structured.
• Look for the common patterns of organization that you find in articles.
• Pay attention to connecting words in order to understand the pattern of organization.
• Write a summary of a text, making sure that it incorporates the organizational pattern of the original.
• If the text is a comparison, be sure that your summary reflects that and uses appropriate transition words and phrases for comparison.
• If the text argues two points of view, be sure both points of view are reflected in your summary and that appropriate transitional words are used.

Ø Types of questions

There are 10-12 different types of multiple choice TOEFL iBT reading questions. The way to get a higher score is to familiarize yourself with all sorts of questions. This will help narrow the choices and select the correct answer.

TOEFL iBT reading questions fall into three categories: basic information, the skills of inference and learning reading skills. These questions can be of different types:

·         Understanding facts and details

·         Identification of negative

·         Referrents location

·         Understanding vocabulary in context

·         Make inferences

·         Determining the purpose

·         Paraphrasing

·         Knowledge consistency

·         Identify the main ideas

·         The logic

·         Summarize the important points

Each of the main guides iBT TOEFL, as HBP, Delta, Barron, Longman, Kaplan, and Cambridge, will provide plenty of practice guidelines and respond to each of these questions. During the performance of their practice exercises and tests, it is useful to record the type of questions that tend to make mistakes, so you can identify what you need to work.

Ø TOEFL Reading Tips

Learn and practice reading strategies and some academics can help you succeed on the TOEFL after. While preparing for the test, read in a variety of topics to expand your vocabulary. You can read textbooks, newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites. Guess the meaning of unfamiliar words and try to catch the main point, even if you do not know the meaning of each word.

Other skills are worth developing include: pre-viewing, reading faster, using the context, make inferences, skimming, scanning, making connections, summarizing, note taking, and synthesis. Improve the skills of each of these sub-will allow for greater global score on the reading section.

Preparation Strategies

Read, Read, Read. Read in English regularly. Focus on academic texts from university textbooks or other materials. Do not stick to one or two topics that you are interested in. Read from variety of subjects - science, social science, business, arts, geography, history, economics, and others. Academic texts, apart from textbooks, could be found in variety of articles and academic publications on the Internet or university libraries.

Find the purpose of the passage. Knowing the purpose of the reading you may easily find what the writer is trying to accomplish. The purpose of the passage in most of the readings is embedded in the introductory paragraph which is one of the most important paragraphs in the text. Most of the passages in TOEFL iBT will try to do the following:

·         To Explain - to present the information on a specific topic in explanatory manner. These texts contain mostly factual information.

·         To Resolve - it aims at finding solution for some sort of dilemmas or questions that need answers. Usually there would be a debate.

·         To convince - to persuade the reader of the validity of certain viewpoint or idea. There would be opinions and support with evidence in those type of passages.

Increase vocabulary. When reading wide variety of texts on different subjects you should make a word list. Organize your list in topics for better results. Example topics could be business, geography, science and others. Make flashcards to help you learn those word lists. Use the words learned in your writings and speaking.

Take notes. During all sections of TOEFL iBT note taking is allowed. It is a crucial component for success. It is difficult to remember all facts and details from a reading text in order to answer the questions. You also don't have enough time to search for those again in the text. So, the solution is called note taking. When skimming and reading the texts you should write down all important facts and details in order to find them fast and easily when you need them. See also our effective note taking strategies.

Learn how to skim the text. Skimming means reading the text quickly to obtain very first general impression on what the text is about, what its main idea is. Skimming corresponds with Reading to find information objective in TOEFL iBT. You should develop your ability to skim quickly but at the same time to identify all major points in the passage. Take notes. See also our skimming strategies.

Read after skimming. Only skimming is not enough. Read the passage again. This time read it more carefully, but don't forget that you have limited time. Take notes. Identify the passage type - classification, cause/effect, compare/contrast, problem/solution, etc.

Try to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words in the passages, the context can help to do that. After that, check those words in the dictionary. Guessing the words from the context brings great advantages - you save time and it doesn't disturb your comprehension of the texts.

Highlight some of the pronouns (he, him, they, them, etc.) in the texts. Identify to which nouns in the particular text the highlighted pronouns refer.

Practice making general inferences and conclusions based on what is implied in the text.

Learn to organize the data presented in the passage in charts and tables. Create charts with categories and place the important data from the passage in the appropriate category. In TOEFL iBT you are not asked to create charts. Rather, charts are provided and you are asked to categorize the information in pre-defined categories.

Advice for Reading, Performance Level: Low
Score Range: 0–14

1. Read as much and as often as possible in English.
• Read texts on a variety of topics.
• Read both academic and non-academic materials.
• Read about subjects that interest you and that DON'T interest you.
• Write basic questions to test your understanding of a text.
• Write questions and answers about the first paragraph. Then guess what might be discussed in the next paragraph.
• Use your knowledge of grammar to understand difficult sections of a passage.
• Think carefully about the relationship between independent and dependent clauses.
• Look for words that refer back to some information given in a previous section of the text.
• Look at pronouns and find the nouns that they refer to
• Look at relative pronouns (who, that, which, whom, whose) used in adjective clauses (for example, The student whoseclassmates are taking the TOEFL® test....) and find the nouns they refer to
• Work with a reading partner. Read different newspaper or magazine articles.
• Write questions about the articles you read.
• Exchange articles with your partner and try to answer your partner's questions.
2. Continually expand your vocabulary knowledge.
• It is important to increase your vocabulary on many subjects because you will have to read about various topics at the university.
• Review lists of terms used in academic textbooks.
• Make a plan for studying new words.
• Write a new word on one side of a card and the definition on the back.
• Write the sentence you saw the word in to help you learn correct usage
• Study the words often and always mix up the cards
• Group the words by topic or meaning. Study the words as a list of related words.
• Study vocabulary by making a list of opposites (words with different meanings) and synonyms (words with similar meanings)
• opposites (relevant-irrelevant; abstract-concrete)
• synonyms (excellent, outstanding, superb)
• Review the new words on a regular basis so that you remember them.
• Expand your vocabulary by analyzing the parts of a word. This will help you understand some unknown words that you see.
• Study roots (a part of a word that other parts are attached to)
• -spect- (look at)
• -dict- (say)
• Study prefixes (a part of word attached to the beginning of a word)
• in- (into)
• pre- (before)
• Study suffixes (part of a word attached at the end of the word)
• -tion (inspection)
• -able (predictable)
• Study word families (the noun, verb, adjective, or adverb forms of related words)
• enjoyment (noun)
• enjoy (verb)
• enjoyable (adjective)
• enjoyably (adverb)
• Use the context to guess the meaning of unknown words.
• Notice when difficult terms are defined in the text.
• Look for examples with an explanation of the meaning of a word.
• Look at the other words and structures around an unknown word to try to understand it.
• Use resources to help you study vocabulary.
• Use an English-English dictionary to learn correct meaning and word usage.
• Get calendars that teach a new word each day or websites that will send you an e-mail with a new word each day.
• Study the vocabulary you find on university websites that give information about the university and the faculty teaching at the school.
• Practice correct usage by making sentences with new words. This will also help you remember both the meaning and the correct usage of the words.
• Have a teacher check your sentences.
• Review the new words on a regular basis so that you remember them.
3. Study the organization of academic texts and overall structure of a reading passage.
• Read an entire passage from beginning to end.
• Look for the main ideas of the article.
• Look for the supporting details.
• Pay attention to the relationship between the details and main ideas
• Learn to recognize the different styles of organization that you find in articles in English in order to understand the way an article is structured
• Pay attention to the connecting words/transitions used for specific relationships.
• steps (first, second, next, finally)
• reasons (because, since)
• results (as a result, so, therefore)
• examples (for example, such as)
• comparisons (in contrast, on the other hand)
• restatements of information (in other words, that is)
• conclusions (in conclusion, in summary)
• Outline a text to test your understanding of the structure of a reading passage.
• Begin by grouping paragraphs that address the same concept.
• Look for ways that main ideas in one paragraph relate to the main points of the next paragraph
• Write one sentence summarizing the paragraphs that discuss the same idea
• Look at connections between sentences.
• Look at how the end of one sentence relates to the beginning of the next sentence
• Think about the connection between the ideas of the two sentences
• Combine the sentences using appropriate transitions words to show the relationship between ideas
• Write a summary of the entire passage.

Advice for Reading. Performance Level: High
Score Range: 22–30

1. Read as much and as often as possible. Make sure to include academic texts on a variety of topics written in different genres as part of your reading.
• Read major newspapers, such as The New York Times or Science Times.
• Use the websites of National Public Radio (NPR) or the BBC to get transcripts of shows and study the content and new vocabulary you encounter.
2. Continually expand your vocabulary knowledge.
• Develop a system for recording unfamiliar words.
• Write each word on a card and mix up the cards each time you study them. Write the context (the sentence the word was used in) to help you learn correct word usage.
• Group the words according to topic or meaning and study the words as a list of related words.
• Review the new words on a regular basis so that you remember them.
• Increase your vocabulary by analyzing word parts. Study roots,prefixes, and suffixes.
• Study word families (e.g., enjoyment, enjoy; enjoyable, enjoyably)
• Use available vocabulary resources.
• Use a good thesaurus to study various shades of meanings of words.
• The Longman Language Activator provides "collocations" (words used together).
• There are online concordancers that search corpora and provide examples of words in context, such as the British national corpus.
• Practice using context to guess the meaning of unknown words.
• Continually practice using new words you encounter in your speech and writing. This will help you remember both the meaning and the correct usage of the words.
3. Think carefully about how ideas are connected within a text. The connections between sentences and the links between paragraphs are critical to complete comprehension.
• To understand the structure of a reading passage, outline the text.
• Begin by determining the main idea or concept presented in each paragraph. Remember to distinguish between the main points and the details that exemplify them.
• Group paragraphs that address the same concept. Think about how the key idea in one paragraph relates to the main point of the next paragraph. If there are several paragraphs that focus on the same idea or concept, synthesize the key points into one main idea.
• Write one sentence or phrase summarizing the paragraphs that discuss the same idea.
• Add important details that support each major idea or concept.
• Learn to recognize different organizational styles in order to understand the way an article is structured.
• Look for the common patterns of organization that you find in articles.
• Pay attention to connecting words in order to understand the pattern of organization.
• Write a summary of a text, making sure that it incorporates the organizational pattern of the original.
• If the text is a comparison, be sure that your summary reflects that and uses appropriate transition words and phrases for comparison.
• If the text argues two points of view, be sure both points of view are reflected in your summary and that appropriate transitional words are used.

http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/stratread.htm#topofpage

https://www.ets.org/toefl/ibt/scores/improve/advice_reading_high

http://i-courses.org/reading-tips