The most important tips to Master CELPIP Reading Task 3

Speaker A: 00:00:00

You know, one of the most frequent challenges that test takers say they struggle with on the CELPIP exam, specifically on the reading section of the CELPIP exam, is that they run out of time. They simply don't have enough time to read the text and answer the questions.

And if that has been your struggle, then my friends sit back and relax because today's episode is going to be for you and today what you're going to take out of this episode and is, I hope, a really practical, actionable strategy that you can employ that will help you to always have enough time to work through the reading section of the CELPIPIP exam. Hi, my name is Aaron. Welcome to the CELPIP Success Podcast. If this is your first time dropping in on this channel, welcome.

I'm so glad that you're here. If you are a returning visitor, if you're a returning visitor, no, you're not a returning visitor.

If you're a returning listener or if you've seen this channel before and watched a few of my videos. And I'm so glad that you are coming back and checking this video out, checking out this podcast episode.

Reading task three, that's what we're going to be focusing on today. And time is a huge part of why people struggle on specifically these last two sections of the reading part of the exam, task three and task four.

And the main reason is that one, the text is way more difficult. Like, each section of the reading exam gets harder as it goes along. So part one, it's not easy, but it's probably easier.

Of the four, part two, it's a little bit more challenging. But part three and part part four, you're reading the. The difficulty level is what I'm trying to say.

The difficulty level of the text is at like a strong intermediate or upper intermediate to advanced level of English.

So that right there gives you some idea of why you might be struggling because the questions and the texts are getting more difficult as you go along. So if you've been wondering to yourself, boy, I started off well on reading task one and two, but all of a sudden it got really difficult.

Well, that's normal because the test itself is getting more difficult. So keep that part in your mind, don't let it throw you off.

And instead, here's what you need to be focusing on as you dig into this section of the exam. The first thing to be aware of that I want to tell you about is all about randomness.

In the previous sections of the reading exam, you would be able to work through the questions and finding the answers in kind of like an orderly fashion. Meaning that the first questions that you'll be working with, the answer will be found probably near the beginning or the top of the article.

And as you move down the questions, as you move down the questions, the answers will be also moving down in the text. It would follow like this logical progression as you go through. But reading task three of the self of exam is different.

It doesn't follow that logical progression of ideas. Okay, so that's something that's super important for you to keep in mind. It's not going to follow a logical progression.

You're going to be finding answers to your questions scattered throughout the text itself. So bear that in mind. And that leads me into the next part.

Frequently made mistakes on this section of the exam include, number one, rushing to work with the questions.

I've heard this happening so many times, both by the people that I work with and I've seen it online in like message boards and on YouTube channels that are focused on the self of the exam.

People say that their strategy is to immediately grab or pay attention to the questions and jump over to the text and start reading to try to answer those questions. That's the first mistake.

Or the second mistake that is pretty frequent too is that you just dive right into reading the entire four paragraphs of this section of the examination.

And the problem with doing those two things is that you're going to find you're going to run out of time in the first mistake where you are immediately focusing on the questions and then jumping over to the text in order to try to find the answers. You're going to find that you're going to be reading and rereading and rereading again in order to find those answers.

And bear in mind, like what I was explaining before, that randomness factor, right? The answers to your questions are not going to be following a logical progression as you go through the text.

So you're going to be hunting all over the place.

So if you're just looking at the questions and then diving over to the text itself to try to find what you're looking for, well, that means you're losing time because you're going to be re reading texts all the time. So don't do that.

The second part, where you just focus on reading the text first and then focus on trying to answer the questions, what you'll probably find is that because the text is more challenging than other texts that you were reading, your reading is probably going to go a bit slower because you're going to be finding words and phrases and ideas that might be beyond your current level of English, or you're going to find new words or new phrases that you had never seen before. And those new words and phrases will probably slow you down and make you lose time. So the whole.

To summarize this part, the mistakes that I was just talking about, working only with the questions and then diving over to the text to try to find the answers or trying to read through the whole text first, both of those things are going to steal precious time from you. And here's the thing. You only have 10 minutes to do this section of the exam. 10 minutes.

And there are nine questions that you need to deal with in order to work through this section of the exam. So time is precious and you don't want to waste it. All right?

And before we start digging into the strategy that I want to present to you today that I think is going to make a huge difference for you, I want to talk about some really important definitions, some words that you're going to be hearing me.

Hopefully, if my own thinking stays intact as I go through this, I want to share some definitions with you so that you know what I'm talking about so that we're on the same page. Okay? Because these words are going to be especially important to doing this section of the exam well. And those definitions are.

You're going to hear me talking about skimming. And when I say skimming, I. I'm not saying that you're going to read the entire text. In fact, one of.

I guess I could have in a way included this in the frequently made mistakes that I was talking about at the beginning where you try to read every single word inside of the text. You don't need to read every single word in order to do well on this section of the exam. And I hope that you'll take that idea in and own it.

You don't need to read every single word on this section of the self of exam. Okay?

So remove that from your mind if you're thinking, oh my gosh, how am I going to have enough time to read through all of this dense looking text in just 10 minutes? Great news, my friend. You don't have to. But what you do need to do is get really good at skimming and scanning.

And we're going to talk about that right? Right now.

So skimming is not reading every word, but instead you are looking at, let's say, the first paragraph and you're just letting your eyes quickly pass from sentence to sentence and all you're doing is looking for key words. You're looking for important words that kind of might point to what the whole idea of that paragraph is all about.

And I've actually got a definition here of what a keyword actually is. It's something that is specific. It's something that is important.

A word that is, that is important or vital to the meaning of everything going on in the paragraph. So it's telling you what this paragraph is all about.

So they're really important words that are usually like nouns or d, dates, times, things like that, people's names, country names, things like that could be considered a keyword. So we're looking for specific, important or vital or meaningful words that help draw out what that text or what that paragraph is all about.

And when you are looking for keywords, because that's going to be a really big part of, of this strategy that we're going to be sharing together today. You'll probably find most of what you're looking for in the very first sentence of each paragraph. Not always. There's always exceptions, aren't there?

But most frequently you're going to be able to find a general idea of what that paragraph is all about by just looking at that first line of that paragraph. And the reason is, is that that first line is called a topic sentence.

And what I mean by a topic sentence is that the whole goal of that first line in most cases is to tell you what the rest of the paragraph is going to be talking about. It might not say something like, this is what the next paragraph is all about.

No, it's not going to be about that, but it will give you some information that is kind of like, this is what's going to come here. It's like each paragraph, if it's done correctly, should be about the same idea, like talking about the same idea.

And when you move on to a new idea, that's when you start a new paragraph. So the job of that topic sentence is simply to tell you what's coming next inside of this paragraph.

And very frequently, not always, but very frequently, you're going to find great keywords that you can use in that first part of the sentence. Not in the first part of the sentence, but in that first line of the paragraph. That's where you're going to find probably the.

The most important keywords for that paragraph, like what that paragraph is going to be all about. Okay, so let's talk really quickly again. Skimming. It's all about just letting your eyes quickly float over the text.

Looking for keywords that would tell you something important about that sentence or about that paragraph. And then when it comes to scanning, that's the other word that's important here, and I don't have it listed up here.

But skimming and scanning are the two probably most important things that you need to be practicing and able to do in order to succeed on. On this section of the reading exam for the cell blip. And scanning means. Means that you are taking those key.

That keyword, and you're looking in the text itself. Like you're taking like a.

A keyword in the question, rather, and you are going to jump over to the text and you're going to scan the text for that keyword or a word that means the same thing as that keyword, like a paraphrase or a synonym. So again, in both of those, in skimming and scanning, we're not reading all the text.

We're just letting our eye quickly move through the text in order to find specific details or specific information.

So that's what scanning is, taking a keyword from the question, and we're looking in the text itself to see if we can find that word specifically mentioned in the text or a word or a phrase that means the same thing as that keyword. Hope that makes sense. Okay, so now that we've got our definitions, hopefully set in our minds, here's the strategy. You need to build a map.

Remember the mistakes that we talked about at the beginning?

The mistake is rushing in to immediately begin either working with the questions or rushing in and immediately being like, I've got to read all of this. No, what you do need to do, though, is to build a map and build a map of what you might say. How am I going to build a map out of what I'm reading?

Well, that's a great question. And this is how you do it. First, you're going to use your notepaper.

Like, when you go into the test center, they're going to give you pieces of paper and something to write with. That's your note paper. And there's a few things to keep in mind as you go through this. Number one, your notes are for you only. All right?

That's super important for you to keep in mind. Nobody else is going to see this except you. That means it's okay to be messy as long as you can read your own writing.

I've done that to myself quite a few times where I've been taking notes really quickly as I go along. And when it comes time to actually referencing those Notes later to answer questions.

There's have been times where I'm like, what in the world did I write there? You don't want to do that to yourself. So it's okay to be messy as long as you can understand your own writing. So keep that in mind.

You, you can be messy. You also don't need to worry about grammar. You don't have to worry about spelling. As long as you know what you've written.

You don't even have to worry about writing full words if you feel like you don't have enough time. You can use symbols, you can use abbreviations. This is just for you. They're for your eyes only. And here's what I want you to put on your notebook.

I want you to very quickly write the following letters, one on top of the other, like one line for each letter. Okay?

The first letter that I want you to write is T. Under that A, and then under that B and under that C. And then under that the letter D. So T, A, B, C and D. And if you are watching along, that's what it looks like. Just really quickly writing the letters on the page again, messy is totally fine as long as you know what you're talking about.

And what do these letters stand for? That's a wonderful next question, isn't it? So T means the title. And I don't want you to write this on your paper.

You don't need to write T title, no, just the letter T. And just know in your head that T means title. A refers to paragraph A, B refers to paragraph B, and so on. Okay? And again, we're not writing paragraph A title. We're not writing paragraph B title.

We're not writing all that out because remember, we don't have a lot of time. We have to go really quickly here in doing this. In fact, setting up your paper like this should only take you about 10 seconds or less, 5 seconds.

That, that should be your goal, to quickly scribble down an organization to your paper so you know what to write. Okay? So T is the title, A, the title of paragraph A, B, the title of paragraph B, and so on.

And what you'll notice on the exam is each of the paragraphs are labeled. Like the first paragraph will be labeled A, the second paragraph will be labeled B, the third C, and the fourth D. Okay?

So that's why we're writing those things on our notes. We're giving our minds and our eyes a place of reference.

Now, how do we determine what to write in each of those categories that's a great question for the title. I want you to look at paragraph A. The very first paragraph is going to tell you what the rest of the article is going to be all about.

The rest of the three other paragraphs under paragraph A, which is the first one, paragraph A will tell you what those remaining paragraphs are going to be all about.

So what I want to challenge you to do is take about 10 seconds and quickly skim through paragraph A, looking for keywords that could tell you or give you an idea of what this whole article is going to be about. Again, only about 10 seconds to do this. So you have to be fast. You don't have enough time to read everything, right?

We're just going to let our eyes quickly pass through that paragraph looking for what those key words could be. And when you settle on one again, in just about 10 seconds or so, you settle on one.

And then all I want you to do is write it quickly beside that T letter in your notes. Usually it'll be just one word. It could be a short phrase. But keep it simple. We're not writing sentences here. We're just using simple words.

All right, so that's what the T is.

We're trying to see what this whole text is going to be talking about, just to give our minds a place of reference to know, okay, it's talking about this. Next, we're going to dive into each of the paragraphs and we're going to do the same thing. Again, we're not reading the entire paragraph here.

All we're going to do is very quickly let our eyes pass through that text and we're going to be like, for example, in paragraph A, we kind of already did this for the title, but we're going to be just looking through that first paragraph to see what that specific paragraph is all about. And you might get lucky and find that information in that topic sentence.

That first sentence of the paragraph, which will usually tell you what the rest of that paragraph is all about. So pay attention especially to that first sentence.

It won't always be this way, but a lot of the times it is, or it can be, is that you'll find what that keyword that tells you what the rest of the paragraph is all about in that first line. So you'll find it, and then you'll quickly write what that keyword is or what that title is for that paragraph next to the letter.

So paragraph A, you'll write what you discover, like what that keyword is that belongs to that paragraph, and then you'll do the same thing for paragraph B.

You'll quickly skim through that paragraph, looking at at first that first sentence of the paragraph for clues or ideas, keywords that would tell you what that paragraph is going to be all about. You're going to write it on your notes next to the paragraph name.

So the idea here is that you're building a really quick map that will tell you where you're going to be hunting for information once we begin working with the questions. Okay, so we're defeating that first mistake that we were talking about.

You remember when we opened up today's episode, we were saying that one of the most frequently committed mistakes on this section of the exam is just jumping over to the questions and then looking in the text itself to try to find the answers. And it's a waste of time because the answers can be scattered all over the place in the text.

But if you take about a minute to build this map, and that's all, you should give yourself a minute or less to quickly build this map.

Then, instead of losing time going through the text again and again and again trying to find the answers to your questions, if you do a good job of identifying what each of the paragraphs are about in general, you'll know where to begin looking. Or you'll have a really good idea of where to begin looking when you're actually starting to work with the questions themselves.

I hope that makes sense. All right, so I already showed you what my. My notepad looks like, right? It's not neat. Yours doesn't have to be neat.

And when you're writing in the titles of each of those paragraphs, again, it doesn't have to be neat either. And again, it does not need to be full sentences.

It just should be maybe one or two keywords that will help you to identify what each of those paragraphs are all about. And then finally, now comes where we put all of these ideas together.

Once you have your map, and again, it should only take you about a minute or so to build this. So you need to be fast in doing this. I mean, we've spent.

We've spent about 20 minutes talking about this just because we're walking through it together. But on your actual test day, when you're practicing this yourself, you should only give yourself about one minute to build your map.

So you have the other nine minutes left to begin working through the questions. And here's what you need to do. You look at the question question number one.

We're going to, like, skim that question to see if you can find keywords in the question, right? Important words, vital keywords. That's what we're hunting for in the question.

And when you identify an important word in that question, then we're going to, we're not going to jump over to the text yet.

We're going to jump over to our notes and we're going to use our map to point us to the paragraph where we need to focus to find the answer or the most likely place where we need to find the answer. And once we know where we need to begin looking, we're still not going to read the entire text.

We're still not even going to read the entire paragraph where we're looking.

All we're going to be doing is, is taking that keyword that we identified in the question and we're going to quickly skim through that paragraph to see if one we get lucky and we identify, we get a direct match. Like if we see that the keyword being mentioned in, from the question being mentioned in our paragraph, that would be great.

It might happen once or twice, but probably not all the time.

Instead, what you'll probably find is a word or a phrase that means the same thing as, as that keyword in your question, but it's written differently, right? It's something similar, but written or expressed in a different way. That's what you're looking for.

And when you find it, if you find that, that exact match or if you find the paraphrase or the synonym of that keyword in your question, that's when you're going to slow down and you're going to read around that keyword or around that word or phrase that you found in the text in order to see if, if what it's talking about right there in that part is answering the question. So you're not, you know, automatically assuming that you found the right answer, you're slowing down.

And this is where you, you will read it a little bit more carefully to see if that is what the question is asking you about. And if it's not, you just move, move around a little bit more in the text to see if you can find what you're looking for.

So as a quick summary, when you're ready to begin working with the questions, you're still not going to be reading the entire text here.

You're just going to grab a keyword from the questions, then you're going to use your map, you're going to pull out your notes, and then you're going to determine where you're going to begin. Your hunt for that keyword that you pulled from the question.

When you determine what paragraph would be the best place to begin looking, that's when you're going to skim again.

You're going to let your eye go quickly through that paragraph to see if you can find an exact match between the keyword and the question inside of your text. Or a word or a phrase that means the same thing, like paraphrased or. Or a synonym.

And that's going to be the most likely way that you're going to find your answers here. There are going to be a lot of paraphrase and a lot of synonyms going on.

You probably will not have a lot of answers that are a direct match at this point in the exam. So keep that in mind. You're looking for paraphrase, and you're looking for synonyms, words that mean the same thing as your keyword.

And that's how you. You will begin working through the answers to these questions. So we've been talking a lot about things that have to do with your vocabulary.

Like when we're talking about, you know, finding keywords and working with words or phrases that are paraphrased or synonyms, things that mean the same thing as other words, that could be where you run into a lot of trouble.

And one of the things that's super important for you to be always doing so that you're getting ready for this section of the exam, the reading section of the celpip, is to be always reading and not just reading the same kinds of things.

I always encourage my students, I encourage myself to be reading widely, like, not always in the same style, not always on the same topics, not always in the same genres. Like, always be stepping out of what you're used to reading. Because when you do that, you're going to be coming across new ways of saying things.

You're going to be coming across new words, new phrases.

Like, a couple of years ago, I've shared this before on the podcast, but a couple of years ago, I had the privilege of working with someone who was a programmer, and they were expert readers about everything that had to do with programming and computers and, you know, data.

They had advanced reading skills in this world, but as soon as you step, as soon as they stepped out of that world, that was so what they were used to.

And they had to start reading about, you know, like, I don't know, environmental disasters or if they had to read anything that had to do with other things that were not related to their specific field of interest. And focus, they struggled. And it's not because they're stupid. It's not because they're not good at English.

It's only because they were focusing their, their vocabulary development on one area and every topic out there that you can read about. Kind of like if you think about it, it represents a whole other world of words.

And on the CELPIP exam, you're going to be encountering probably articles, you're going to be coming across reading material that is going to take you outside, probably of what you're used to reading.

And the best way for you to prepare for that is by reading widely so that you are encountering those new worlds of words on a regular basis, on your own.

And when you encounter those new words, because you will, if you purposefully step out of what you're used to reading, you are going to find words, phrases, ideas that are new to you. And that's a good thing. That's how you begin building your vocabulary out.

And when you find those new words, the first thing that you should do is understand what they mean. And it might be helpful for you to keep a vocabulary journal where you write those new words down, where you write what that word or phrase means.

And you can find that out sometimes by looking at the paragraph or the sentences around that new word. Sometimes the context will give you an idea of what that word means. Other times, you might have to just go ahead and look in a dictionary, Google it.

What does that word mean? And when you know what it means, write down the meaning.

And then you try to use that new word as many times as you possibly can in your conversation, in your writing. Try to use your new word, not memorize, but use it. And the more you do that, the more your vocabulary will grow older over time.

Unfortunately, this is not something that you can do in a weekend. This is not something that you can do in even a month. It's a, it's a long term commitment to building your vocabulary.

And that's the best way for you to be preparing yourself for those paraphrase or those synonym situations when you're looking for keywords in this section of the exam. The only way to be getting yourself ready for this is to be building your vocabulary on a regular basis over time.

I hope that you found that this episode to be helpful and I hope that you'll come back again and join me in the next edition of the Celpip Success podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great week. Bye. Bye.