The IELTS exam does not measure how good you are at scanning through paragraphs as fast as machines do. If you are wondering how to improve vocabulary for IELTS reading to reach a band 7, 8, or 9, you need a proper plan that works. Depending on basic exam tricks or trying to guess common vocabulary for IELTS reading passages without a proper plan will leave you lost when facing unfamiliar academic texts.
You can spend hours studying different strategies for each exam method & practices identifying keywords. However, when you finally open the exam & find that you are looking at a collection of unfamiliar academic texts, many of which you do not understand and have no clue about how to translate will likely leave you lost.
If you want to reach a score of 7, 8, and especially 9, you need to depend on a new plan of action in order to study vocabulary that will help you in the exam. Memorizing long, random lists of words with their matching definitions will not work and you might also forget nearly all of those words at the time of the exam. What you need is a system that works! This blog article will be focusing on 4 very powerful methods of vocabulary expansion, which are word families, collocations, the academic word list, and the flashcard method.
What is IELTS?
The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) is highly recognized as a English proficiency exam for education and immigration purposes. The test evaluates your ability to use and communicate in four key areas of language that are listening, reading, writing, and speaking, with scores ranging from 0 to 9. Each of these skills has its own score and will contribute to a combined total score. The final score will indicate how well you can function as a user of English.
Link Between Vocabulary and IELTS Test Score
Having knowledge of the test structure provides you with a great place to start. However, you have to master all of the test’s IELTS reading vocabulary for your score to advance. The academy passages that you will read during the course of the examination will not only require you to know the common definitions of the words, but they will fully measure the flexibility of your language skills. If you find yourself asking, “How can I improve my IELTS reading vocabulary effectively?” Remember that flexibility in language comes to you only through the four basic building blocks: listening, reading, writing and speaking.
1. Stop Learning Single Words
The first thing you have to do is quit learning each word. When examining words for the IELTS, candidates usually treat each word as a separate island. For example, when they see the word “demolish,” they will look it up in the dictionary, write it down, and move on. This wastes valuable study time and resources.
The IELTS Reading Test (as with all tests) has a lot of paraphrasing. In a test question, you might be asked about “Technological Innovation” (nouns), however, in the reading passage, the writer could use different grammatical forms such as “Innovates Technique” for the same word family. When you do this, you may only perceive the specific word “innovation” within the paragraph. Due to this, you may miss your answer! Using word families will help with this! Word families are groups of words that originate from the same roots, meaning all members of a word family will have similar prefixes and suffixes.
Break Down the Word Family
Once you have learned one root word, try to learn its whole family of words.
| Root / Verb | Noun | Adjective | Adverb |
| analyze | analysis | analytical | Adverb |
| create | creation/ creativity | creative | creatively |
| Signify | Significance | significant | Significantly |
| vary | Variety/ variation | Variable/ varied | variably |
By studying word families, you enhance your vocabulary without any additional work. It is an essential strategy when exploring how to improve IELTS reading vocabulary. It also teaches your brain to identify the basic idea of a sentence, even when the grammar has changed. If you encounter a long or unknown word, simply remove its endings until you arrive at the root. This will assist you with “Summary Completion” tasks because you will know immediately what kind of word should be put in as the missing word.
2. Learn Words in Context: The Magic of Collocations
Have you ever read a sentence written by a non-native speaker, but there is just something odd about it, because it has amazing grammar, which is naturally due to some type of collocation that has been misused? This is a common view throughout the linguistics community, including the British Council, which has often stressed that if you truly want to build a strong common vocabulary for IELTS reading, you have to also know who its friends are.
Collocations which means pairs or groups of words that go together naturally in the language. For example, the word ‘fast’ means pretty much the same ‘thing’ as the word ‘quick,’ but you would typically refer to having taken a ‘quick’ shower and using a ‘fast’ automobile. If you tell a native English speaker that you drove a ‘quick’ automobile or took a ‘fast’ shower, they will definitely understand you, but they may also think you are weird.
How Collocations Solve the IELTS Reading Problems
By understanding collocations well, you master the core vocabulary for IELTS reading test structures, which gives you two significant advantages:
- Your reading speed will be greatly improved: The way you read text will change, where you’ll be able to scan each paragraph quickly instead of going through each word, which is time-consuming.
- It can aid with fill-in-the-blanks & cloze exercises: while attending fill-in-the-blanks, if you know collocations, you can narrow the options down to the best possible option.
3. Work Smarter, Not Harder: The Academic Word List (AWL)
One of the biggest issues people face when preparing for the IELTS is how many different words exist in English. Most students fear the fact that they have to remember thousands of words, but the truth is, you need to remember all of the words, and there’s no need to know every scientific term within a passage to answer the questions correctly. The test will not evaluate how much you know about a specific topic; instead, it measures how well you understand academic arguments. So you need to ignore hyper-specific terminology and mainly focus on the AWL.
What is the Academic Word List (AWL)?
The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead as a result of time spent researching, used for creating a list of words that appear frequently in academic writing. This includes virtually all academic areas (history, physics, etc.). These words represent fundamental meaning for debate or discussion on research.
Using the Academic Word List (AWL)
The AWL breaks down into ten different lists based on the frequency of use of each term. Thus, the first list will have the most frequently used words, while the last one will contain the least used terms.
Do not print out all 570 words and learn them; instead, consider the list as a reference guide to help you find the meaning of any word you come across while practising reading comprehension assessments. Once you have identified such a term, refer back to the list and see if it is included in the list; if so, they are considered valuable, so highlight the term and study that word along with its related forms. This is important because they might show up in the exam, regardless of the types of reading comprehension assessments you complete.
4. Making Learning Stick: The Flashcard System
You were super proud of yourself as you learned a bunch of new words on Tuesday. But the sad reality is on Friday morning, when you look back and don’t remember anything. This is due to how our brains work with memory retrieval. Initially, your brain stores new vocabulary in your short-term memory. If you don’t use that word again shortly after learning it, your brain considers that word as useless data and will remove it from your short-term memory and return it to Lazy-land. The only way to transfer a word from short-term memory to long-term memory is by employing a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) using flashcards.
How to Create a Powerful Flashcard for Your IELTS Preparation
No matter whether you prefer the use of an old-fashioned paper index card or the use of modern computer programs such as Anki or Quizlet, the organization of the content on your flashcard is critical. The classic flashcard has the word in English on the front side and the translation into your mother language on the back. Using flashcards like this provides you with little or no benefit when you take an IELTS Reading test because it does not teach you the context and nuances associated with your flashcards.
Create your flashcards for each of the targeted vocabulary words in a mini-encyclopedia format:
- Front side of the card: This side is only meant for the targeted word.
- Back side of the card: This side of the card should include all the following items:
- A clear definition of what the word means in English.
- The word family that corresponds to the target vocabulary word.
- Most common collocates of the given target vocabulary word.
- Create an example sentence using the target vocabulary word. You can either write your own sentence that uses the vocabulary word and is meaningful to you or you can copy the exact words from the IELTS reading passage from which you found it.
The Principle of Quality Over Quantity:
There are many learners who believe that larger is always better. They may try to learn 50 new words each day, and end up forgetting it. At that point, they quit.
Be realistic and gentle with yourself. Make an effort to focus on learning no more than 5-10 high-quality words per day. It may not sound like much, but if you were to learn just 7 words a day, you would be able to learn almost 50 words per week and then over 200 words each month, with very strong “flexible vocabulary” knowledge. In terms of IELTS preparation, knowing 200 words completely, including collocations, families and uses, is infinitely more useful than only having a vague understanding of 1,000 words.
5. Transforming your Vocabulary into Points for the Highest Band Score
After your vocabulary learning has become automated, the next skill you will need to master is using your vocabulary when you have the clock running while taking the exam.
How the IELTS Reading Paper is a Game of Hide and Seek using Synonyms
The IELTS Reading Paper is a very large game of hide and seek, where using synonyms is key. The questions on the worksheet will most likely have different vocabulary from what is found in the reading passage.
- The question may state, “The negative impacts of new factory production methods…”
- But the reading passage may state, “Negative results of modern factory production methods…”
If you know that “negative” and “harmful” are synonyms, and that “impact” and “results” all have the same meaning, then it will be easy to identify your answer. Every time you review a word on your flashcard you should think, “If someone wrote a question using that vocabulary, how would they say it?”
Becoming a Master Guessmaker
When you encounter an unknown term on your test, do not worry; instead, use these three tips to assist you in being a sleuth:
- Analyse the word by looking at its basic parts. For example, “un-” and “de-” are both prefixes that show opposition, whereas “-ion” is used as a way of indicating that the word is a noun.
- Examine the context, the associated text can provide a general understanding of how to categorize the word based on its connotation (positive or negative based upon the general tone of the paragraph).
- Look for cortege signals, transitional words such as “although” will usually signal that you can predict whether the idea or thought you are guessing at (the missing thought) is either successful or unsuccessful.
Vocabulary Plan
If you want to watch your reading score rise from 6 to a Band 7.5 or 8, all you need is a proper strategy that is both actionable and sustainable. Here is a realistic plan you can start applying each week:
- Monday & Tuesday: Select one academic article or IELTS practice passage. Read it carefully and highlight (and write down) 10 good, useful words that are new or difficult to use in a sentence.
- Wednesday: Investigate those 10 words and look for them in the dictionary. Then find their word family, and review the common collocations associated with them.
- Thursday: Prepare flashcards for those 10 words according to our above-mentioned format.
- Friday: Use time limits to perform a practice reading test and have your brain actively search for synonyms and paraphrases of each word you’ve worked with.
- Saturday: Spend approximately 15 or 20 minutes cleaning out the backlogs of your flashcard reviewing. Allow the benefit of the spaced repetition system to work for you consistently.
- Sunday: For this day, do not study IELTS and read articles from The Economist, National Geographic or BBC News that you enjoy reading just for fun. You will be surprised at how many of your newly learned vocabulary words appear naturally in the real world.
Developing a strong vocabulary for the IELTS reading test does not require any inherent ability or intelligence. Iit only requires consistency as well as having an effective system for doing so. You can turn the IELTS Reading test, which may appear initially to be a huge obstacle, into one of your biggest strengths by getting away from bland memorization-based learning and concentrating instead on how words relate to one another, their variations in form, and their many reoccurrences. Continue visiting your Hong Kong office each month, keep building your flashcards, and continue to trust what you are doing in order to accomplish your goal of having an extensive vocabulary by the time you take your test.
If you’d like to stop guessing and truly want to understand these vocabulary skills, choosing the right coaching classes for IELTS that support you throughout the journey filled with hardship. Finding the best coaching centre for IELTS ensures you have structured guidance and expert feedback every step of the way. Let Tiju’s Academy assist you today. We provide a complete IELTS preparation course that simplifies IELTS and makes it easy to understand. We will provide you with everything you need to successfully pass the IELTS test, where you will learn how to break down long word lists and learn the meaning of words in those lists. When learning about the reading, writing, speaking, and listening sections of the IELTS test, Tiju’s Academy will teach you tools to help you improve your score.
Whether you choose to attend Tiju’s Academy online from home or in person, you will receive the proper education needed to help you obtain your desired band score with confidence.
