A unique strategy to upgrade your PTE Reading skill

Reading is one of the best ways to advance comprehension over time in addition to gaining more knowledge, ideas, and especially new vocabulary when it comes to learning languages. If English learners want to take English Proficiency tests in the future, it’s essential to know how to read effectively today.

Reading effectively helps readers widen their vocabulary bank, obtain knowledge about particular topics, and most importantly, level up their comprehension. In this article, we will be exploring the five (05) unique steps to improve our reading effectiveness. 

Step 1: Skim through to find suitable content

Skim through means to read or consider something quickly in order to understand the general points, without comprehending it in detail. Why should we do this first? The reason is to pick your Just-right content to save time and boost reading efficiency. For your preference, there are always three types of content that every single English learner faces including Easy, Difficult, and Just-right content.

• Easy content: Students understand 90% of the content, which makes this type easy. In other words, students almost cannot learn anything new here because there is just a fraction of new knowledge, which isn’t worth spending time on if we consider the effectiveness of our reading progress.  
• Difficult content: On the contrary, this type is very difficult for students to read because they understand lower than 70%. The rest 30% of challenging content is too much for study as it’s time-consuming, which could possibly be counter-productive and demotivating.  
• Just-right content: This content is ideal for immersing yourself in studying that students understand from 70% to 90% of the content. English learners use 10% to 30% of their knowledge to use as a foundation to study the other 70% to 90%. 

 If you don’t know where to find content, here are your recommendations.

• NPR: A Free American article source that English learners can find a variety of topics such as Business, Books, Food, Health, Science, etc. 
• Forbes, HBR, New York Times, etc: These sources are paid to read. Yes, we can read a few articles a month, but it wouldn’t be enough to advance our Reading. So if students are able to get your paid account, it would be great. 

Conclusion: Skimming through is undoubtedly vital in picking the Just-right content to boost our comprehension and efficiency. Just-right content provides us with lots of new words to widen our vocabulary bank, new knowledge about specific ideas, and much more but we don’t need to devote much time to it.  

Step 2: Take notes while reading

Taking notes is irreplaceable in terms of studying new words, ideas, and knowledge. As we already discussed in Step 1 we pick Just-right content because there are from 10 to 30% that we don’t understand. Therefore, in this step, we need to take notes on words, ideas, or knowledge that we think we can learn the most from. 

It’s super easy to do. For example, we need to read everything thoroughly and take notes on phrases, idioms, collocations, and so on. 

This is our example, “Sweet potato memories”.

• a fraction of;
• minerals;
• fade from;

Feel free to take notes on anything you like but avoid looking up new words immediately because it interrupts our learning process, and it could take the whole day to complete one article. Students should finish their article and search for meanings and pronunciations later. One idea to ensure that students finish their articles is to pick a short article, around 500 to 1000 would be awesome to start. 

Step 3: Review all keywords

It's time to review new words. We know you may haven’t been waiting for this step for so long. Seeing new words but not understanding what it means really drives us crazy. We get it. 

We review all words by checking their meanings, pronunciation, synonyms, and how to use them with some examples. English learners should prepare a notebook or use the note-taking functions right on their laptops for review. 

Some words have lots of meanings in different contexts such as Minerals, students should check them all in Oxford Learners’ Dictionary or Cambridge Dictionaries for a better understanding.

Step 4: Summarise what we read

The benefits of summarising are undeniable. It helps students reinforce knowledge and key points of the article besides reviewing all new words one more time. We have our summary for your preference, but firstly, please try to do it yourself.

If you are ready, let’s check our summary here.

Insights from Africa regarding sweet potatoes: Agricultural economist Edward Mabaya discusses the various types in Zimbabwe and their nutritional advantages, underscoring recent initiatives to boost their popularity. CEO James Kassaga Arinaitwe of Teach For Uganda recalls depending on sweet potatoes for sustenance during his daily school run, highlighting the persisting problem of food scarcity among Ugandan children. On the other hand, Esther Ngumbi from Kenya expresses a lack of fondness for sweet potatoes due to excessive consumption in her childhood, revealing a preference for a more diverse diet. 

Step 5: Read, Read, and Read

It’s time to read, read, and read. Reading one article time after time is the key to success. Most students believe that they only need to read one time and it’s enough. No, it’s not true! We cannot remember all new ideas, knowledge, or vocabulary if we only read it once, even after we summarise the article. 

Here is your plan for reading the same article again and again. If you finish the article “Sweet potato memories” today, you should read it again after 3 days for the first time and read it the second time after 7 days from the first one. The more times you read, you can wait a bit longer than the previous one.

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In case you are looking for strategies to enhance other skills, let’s take a look at these articles for Listening, Speaking, and Writing skills. 

Improving general English needs indeed to go side-by-side with practising on the PTE Practice Platform. We offer a live-interactive PTE Practice Platform including thousands of practice questions besides instantly detailed feedback to help students check their answers and learn from their mistakes (if any) right away. 

To illustrate, this is our feedback sample for Write Essay where we evaluate users’ answers based on Content, Form, Grammar, Vocabulary, Coherence, and Linguistic Range. We use the same grading elements that Pearson assesses test-takers' skills.

For more details, let’s take a look at this video feedback sample.

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