Read faster without reading worse: three drills for Part 7

Xin chào! Two weeks ago I promised the reading version of the listening routine. Here it is. The Part 7 timing plan tells you how to spend your minutes; these drills give you more of them.

First, what slows you down

It's rarely the vocabulary. It's three habits:

1. Reading word by word, with an inner voice saying each one.
2. Reading the passage first, then the questions, then the passage again.
3. Going back to re-read a sentence you've already understood, just to be sure.

Each drill attacks one habit. Ten minutes, one drill a day, rotate.

Drill 1: Chunking (for habit 1)

Take one single passage. With a pencil, draw a slash after every meaning group: The marketing team / will present / the new campaign / on Friday afternoon. Now read it again, eyes jumping from chunk to chunk, never landing on a single word. Four or five chunks per line is the goal. After a week of this, do it without the pencil. You're training your eyes to move in phrases, which is how fluent readers read.

Drill 2: Purpose first (for habit 2)

Take a passage and cover the questions. Give yourself twenty seconds and write one line: who wrote this, to whom, and why. ("Hotel manager to a guest, apologising for noise, offering a discount.") Then uncover the questions. You'll find the purpose question is already answered and the detail questions now have a map. Twenty seconds spent here buys back two minutes.

Drill 3: The timed re-read (for habit 3)

Read a passage and answer its questions with a timer; note the time. Tomorrow, same passage, and try to beat the time by 20% with the same answers. The day after, again. The passage is not the point. The point is teaching your brain that it understood the sentence the first time, and that going back is a nervous habit, not a need.

Measure it

Once a week, do one full Part 7 timed and write the minutes in your mistake journal next to the score. Speed and accuracy should both climb. If speed climbs and accuracy falls, you're skimming; slow down one notch and keep the chunks.

Next week, the last post of this series: what to do in the final seven days before your test. Hẹn gặp lại! 🌸