Tips to improve your reading skill

In my opinion, reading is the less difficult part of the TOEFL exam, maybe because I am used to read a lot in English. My goal is get at least 90% of the score on the TOEFL’s reading section, and I will share with you what I am going to do in order to achieve this goal.

Reading on the platform - by moriza @ Flickr

Obviously the better way to to improve your reading skill is reading, but not in the way you may be used to. You need to broaden your vocabulary and make sure you understand what you read.

The first step to get this is choose what to read. You should read texts on a wide range of subjects, in different writing styles. Make sure to add in your feed reader blogs from successful people in areas other than yours – marketers or businessmen, for example. If you will take the TOEFL, you shoud also read introductory academic material from different courses, because this is the kind of text most used in the exam.

There are some exercises you can do after reading a passage to better understand what you read. I saw these on the TOEFL guide:

• Identify the passage type (e.g., classification, cause/effect, narration, and so on).
• Create an outline of the passage to distinguish between major and minor points.
• If the passage categorizes information, create a chart and place the information in appropriate categories.
• If the passage describes the order of a process or is a narration, create an outline of the steps in the process or narration.
• Create an summary of the passage using the charts and outlines.
• Paraphrase individual sentences in the passage, and then progress to paraphrase an entire paragraph.

Hope it helps. Good reading!

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