Advanced English Reading

1. Advanced English Reading - Introduction: You want to have perfect English reading skills. You're in the right place. I'm Francis from Last Minute English. And this is Advanced English Reading. The complete Guide to Getting Amazing English Reading Skills. This course is for you if you read English in work or if you want to read English in work. If you study in English or if you want to, if you're going to take an English exam like Alts, Tofl or PTE, and you want to get a great score. Or if you just enjoy reading English novels and articles. But you want to improve. And in this course you'll learn amazing reading strategies to make English reading easy. You'll increase your reading speed and understanding. You'll improve your English vocabulary and your critical thinking skills. You'll find out how to answer all question types in English reading exams, and you'll become more confident in any English situation. Our students are really enjoying this course. Darryl says, this class gives me the confidence for reading English in my everyday life. Joshua says, I'm a university student. I've been able to improve my English reading skills from this course. And Andrew says it's incredibly simple to understand and put into practice. So thank you to Darryl, Joshua, and Andrew for those kind words. So if you want to have perfect English reading skills, let's get started. 2. Introduction: Hello and welcome to the course. This is your advanced English reading course. So let me tell you a little bit about what we're going to be doing. First of all, welcome, welcome to your advanced reading course. So let me ask you some questions. Do you sometimes find it difficult to understand authentic, real texts in English? Or are you preparing maybe for an exam or do you just want to read English more confidently for your work, for your studies, or just for pleasure? If any of those are true for you, then you're in the right place. So what we find is that many English courses kind of neglect the reading part of learning the language. You know. Speaking is, of course, important. Listening is important, writing is important, but reading is also super important and sometimes people forget about it. So that's what this course is all about. We're focusing on reading. We're going to see some strategies, tips and tricks to help you develop your reading skills. It is possible, it's very, very possible to improve your reading skills in English. So let's talk about what's coming up, what can you expect from your advanced reading course? So, we've designed this course to cover all of the different skills that you need to be really good at English reading. Okay, there's six main sections. First of all, the introduction. That's what you're watching right now. So you've already started. Then we're going to look at some strategies to use before you read, before you start reading a text. Then strategies to use while you're reading in the middle of reading. Next, you can probably guess strategies to use after you've finished reading a book, or a story, or a text or an article. We're also going to look at some techniques for reading exams and some common types of questions as well. At the end, we'll bring it all together, We can take a look at each of those areas in just a little bit more detail strategies. Before we read, we're going to look at predicting, skimming and scanning. Then while we read, we'll look at close reading, inferring things. That's going to be a really interesting part. And also questioning that's not just saying hello, what's your name. It's a deeper type of asking questions. Then after reading, summarizing, and synthesizing, bringing different texts together, and also evaluating and reflecting, then the exam techniques. We'll do a little introduction, but we'll talk about comprehension questions, multiple matching, sentence completion questions, and also gapped text where there's a space. Then bringing it all together, we'll do a final reflection and we'll look to the future thinking forward. As we go through this course, you'll see two different types of practice text. The first is shorter texts, and these will be the screen on the slides, just like we're looking at right now. All right? And they're kind of a quick practice to give you the first idea of the skills that we'll be learning. Okay, Then we have longer texts and these are in the resource file. So that's the file that's attached here under the video. So you'll be able to download those files and if you want you can print them. You can read the paper version or you can read the electronic version. So for each section, you'll find the related file underneath the first video of that section. All right, and these are going to give you more extensive reading practice and help you to combine some different skills and strategies that we're going to learn. And sometimes I'll tell you which activities you should complete and other times you're going to have a choice. But the important thing, you'll read dozens of texts on this course and you're going to develop your confidence. You're going to build loads and loads of skills. Now, one thing that people worry about with a reading courses, is it going to be a bit boring? Are you going to feel like this when you're taking this course? Well, we hope not, because we've decided to include lots of different types of texts. So it's not just, you know, very boring articles about things that you don't care about. You're going to be reading plays. You'll be reading novels and textbooks, and poems and letters, horoscopes, SMS messages, advertisements, magazine articles, contracts, E mails, exam questions, and more. So one thing that you definitely won't be in this course is ever bored. It's going to be very interesting and fun. So what do you need for this course? Well, if you've already signed up, which you should have done, you'll have the two main things that you need, which is the motivation to learn. And also a teacher who's ready to help thing. But a couple of things that you could also use, some things that you should have. You should try to find a quiet study place. So try not to watch these videos. Like if you're on the subway on the way to class or the way to work and people are pushing you and the subways going like that, that's not a great way to study. So it's better to find a quiet place where, you know, maybe you have a desk. Or you might go to like a coffee shop or something like that. Where you can concentrate and you can read in peace, quiet, without someone pushing you in the face, because it's their turn to get off the subway. And you'll also need a file on your computer or in cloud storage to keep your reading texts and the notes. Or if you are a bit more traditional like me, you'll need a notebook to write down your notes. Okay. Depending on your study style, you could print some of your texts and make the notes by hand. I like that. I think that's good. And you could keep a physical notebook and use your pens, maybe a highlighter to help you keep your ideas. Now, before we get started with the course, there's an important little process that we have to go through, which is understanding our current strengths, the things we're good at, and also the areas that we should improve. So I'm going to give you five statements and I want you to write down either, you know, typing or in your physical notebook how much you agree with these things, okay? So if you write a number one, that means you totally disagree or this thing is totally not true for you. If you write ten, it means you totally agree. All right? Don't think too hard about it. Just think, okay, what number am I okay, And write down the number. So the first statement, I understand most of what I read in English first time, write down your number number two. If I don't understand, I know which strategies to use to help me understand. Write down your number three. I generally feel confident before a reading exam. Again, write down your number four. It doesn't bother me if I see a word I don't know when reading in English. As long as the general meaning is clear, it doesn't bother me. Means I feel okay. If there's a word I don't know, write down your number five. I often read in English for pleasure or enjoyment, not for studying, or for work, or for things like that. I read because I like it. Write down your number now. Okay. If you need to pause the video and to just quickly write those ones down, that's fine. But you can also download a copy of our reflection journal document from the resource file. Under this video. You can record the scores in there. Or you can put them in a physical notebook and write them by hand. And one important thing is to write down today's date. The date when you're watching this video. All right. You'll see why a little bit later. So when you're doing it, write down today's date. Next we're going to think about some challenges. So I want you to think about the reasons that you're taking this course, okay? So you probably think that you've got some difficulties, some challenges when you're reading in English. All right, here are just some example challenges. People say things like, it takes me a very long time to read, even a short next. The texts have so much vocabulary that I don't know. I seem to miss hidden messages and meanings. I love reading for pleasure in my own language. But when I try in English, I get bored. And when I see a long text in a reading exam, my mind goes blank and I don't know where to start. Okay, now those are just examples. Your challenges might be different. But what I want you to do is to pause the video for as long as you need to and think about your three biggest challenges when you read in English. And that could be like reading for studying, for an exam, for work, for pleasure. Because you're living abroad and maybe you see signs in English and you don't understand whatever it is. Your situation is unique. It's special for you. So I want you to write down the three difficulties, the three challenges that you have with your English reading. Write them in your reflection journal. And then a little bit later we'll come back and look at those challenges again. Okay? But please make sure that you do this. I want you to promise me that you're going to write them down. If you want, you can also write them here under the video in the little chat area, the Q and A area. And we'll take a look at them and you'll be able to see other people's reading challenges as well. So don't be shy. If you want, you can share them under the video, but please make sure that you write three in your reflection journal. So have a try at that now. Finally, let's talk about your goals. So I want you to do a little exercise. I want you to imagine yourself in the near future, okay? And you're reading in English and everything is going very well. So I want you to write a short paragraph. Don't just think about this, actually, write it, okay? We're going to imagine what's going to happen in the future and then we're going to force it, we're going to make it happen, okay? So write a short paragraph and include the following things. Where you are, what you're reading, how you know everything is going well, how you feel. Use the present tense. I don't want you to say I will feel, I want you to say I feel so. Now imagine you're in that situation and imagine that the statements are true. And here's an example. This is Damian from Poland who's 26. I'm in my Eels reading exam. Notice he doesn't say I will be in. He's saying it now. Present tense. I'm in my eye El's reading exam. I've already read the questions and as I begin to read the first text, I notice that I can already see a lot of the correct answers. I feel confident and capable. So I want you to write down your sentence. It doesn't have to be about a else reading. It can be whatever type of reading you would like to do. All right? But I want you to follow those things of where you are, what you're reading, how you know everything is going well, and how you feel. All right? So when you've done that, we're going to save those, Keep those to one side. And we'll check in on those challenges, those statements we made saying 1-10 and also this goal, imagining ourselves in the future. We'll check those later in the course, but for now, let's get started. 3. Predicting Part 1: Welcome back. In this video, we're going to talk about a skillful before reading. That skill is predicting, so let's get started. What is predicting? So predicting is making educated guesses about what might come next in a text. And you can use your own knowledge. You can use information in the text. And you can use clues like photos that are in the text. Don't worry, you don't need a crystal ball. You don't need to be able to see the future. But like a fortune teller, fortune teller is the person who has a crystal ball. Your predictions won't always be correct. Okay. So don't worry if they're not always totally right. It's just one good way of helping us to understand the text and be able to feel more comfortable and more confident when we're reading, When we talk about predicting, it's a skill that we all use in our daily lives. Now let me give you an example. Imagine that you're walking on the beach and you see this scene right there. Can you predict what the man going to say? What do you think? Is he looking down to say, oh my knees so wet? Why did I put one knee on the ground here on the beach? It's probably not going to say that, right? So he's probably going to ask the woman to marry him. He's going to propose. We can't be certain about it. Maybe he does just have a wet, dirty knee. But we can use our knowledge and the context and we can make an educated guess. And that's what predicting is. The first thing that we can do when predicting is predicting the text type. What kind of text are we reading? And this doesn't need any reading at all. We don't need to read anything to be able to predict it. Look, for example, at the format of this document. What kind of document or text are we going to be reading? What does that look like to you? That, of course, is a newspaper. That's what a physical newspaper would look like. We don't need to see any of the little details. We can know that it's going to have headlines and columns, and embedded photos. And that helps us to know, okay, this will be a newspaper article, so let's think a little bit more about that. What type of text do you think would have the following different features? Just like we saw there with the newspaper, we can see that it had the headlines and it had the different articles in different places. What about a text that had a date at the beginning? What type of text would that be? If it had lists or if it had lots of numbers, or a title and subheadings, or speech marks and frequent line breaks, like going to the next line, next line, next line. This might be five different types of texts or maybe it's all the same type. Okay, but I want you to pause the video and think about if you saw these different features, what type of text would you expect them to be in Pause. Have a try now. Okay. First of all, a date at the beginning could be maybe a diary entry like June 24, I'm at home, I just watched a movie. You're writing your diary or your journal. Or it could be a newspaper article, or maybe it's a blog. Post lists, might be a recipe, it might be a job advertisement. These are the skills we need for this job. Or it could be a travel guide. The top ten places to visit when you're in Paris, something like that. If we see lots of numbers, that might be a news article. It might be a scientific journal. Again, it could be a recipe, like three eggs and 6 grams of something. That's not a great recipe. Is it three eggs and 6 grams of something? Or it could be instructions for something medical to make a type of medicine. Number four, a title and subheadings. The title is the big one and subheadings is like each section has a little heading. So that could be a report, it could be a proposal, like a business proposal, it might be an application form. And then this one, the speech marks and like short lines. And then the next line might be a novel or it could be a magazine interview. Like they interview a famous person. Now, of course, those are, you know, just my ideas. You might have had a different idea. Like I said before, it's not an exact science. This is just something that helps us to quickly become familiar with whatever it is that we're reading. 4. Predicting Part 2: The next step we can take is to examine images. So to look at the photos or the drawings or the figures or things like that in the text that we're going to read. Let's do a little activity. So I'm going to show you a picture, an image. Imagine that this image comes as part of a report that you have to read. All right, I want you to look at the image and predict six words that might be in the report. Six words that the report might contain based on this picture. Here is the picture. Pause the video. See if you can think of six words you would expect to read in that report. Pause. Have a try now. Okay, let's take a look. Some suggestions. There are buildings there, they are a bit damaged. Destroy because of course you can see lots of things have been destroyed. There's lots of bricks there. You might see disaster that would be like the wider situation. The wider context accident could be what caused this problem. We might also see knock down. The building might be knocked down. Or another word is demolish. Knocked down usually is a planned thing, but it could also be an accident. Demolish is always, that was the plan to destroy that building rubble. It refers to after there's been an explosion or a destruction of something, there's lots of stuff mixed together on the floor. Maybe the word explosion, that could also be something that we see there. Those are all words that we might see in this report. Actually, the photo is a building in Mexico which was demolished after it was damaged by an earthquake. So we've got like disaster probably we've got knocked down or demolish building as well. We would probably see in that article. Now, you might not have guessed this exactly, but the reason that we make these predictions is it can help us to understand this article more easily. If we can have imagine, okay, this is what it's about. These are the words that I probably will see when I read this article. Now, as well as looking at the picture, we can also look at the captions on the picture. That's the captions of the writing underneath the picture or next to the picture. Let's take a look at this. So you can see it's a picture of a play and there's a caption underneath. Do you think the critic of writing a review about this play, are they going to talk in a positive way or a negative way about this play? Just pause very quickly and read the caption and have a think about it, positive or negative. Have a try now. So that caption says, despite a few bright moments, Alan Small's latest work doesn't live up to the hype. Hype is like the feeling of excitement and people saying, oh my God, it's going to be so good. That's the feeling of hype. But this one doesn't live up to the hype. We think, no, it won't be positive, it might be quite negative. This is like a summary of the whole article. Really, the article will say there's some good points, but mostly it's not that good. The next skill that we can use to help us in our predicting is to predict what comes next. So we could read the title, the introduction, or the first few sentences of a text. And that will often help us make a good prediction about what's coming next, what information will follow. So here we have a review on Trip Advisor. This is a review of a fried chicken restaurant. And what I want you to do is to predict what the reviewer is going to say in the body of the text. I'm going to show you here the picture and well, you can see the title and the number of stars that this person gave Fried Chicken restaurant. Based on that, what do you think the rest of the text will say? Pause. Have a try now. Okay, so you can see the review gives five stars and it says amazing burgers and very reasonably priced. You might have predicted something like the reviewer gave five stars. They were happy with everything. And it's a restaurant review, we'd probably see things about the service, maybe the decoration of the restaurant. He's mentioned prices, so probably something about that. The whole experience. Maybe the starters and the main and the dessert restaurant related information and the restaurant serves fast food. So the tone is probably going to be more informal. It's not going to be like reviewing a very, very expensive restaurant where you might feel like you have to write about it in a higher level way, a more formal way. If it's a fast food restaurant, it's a bit more relaxed. So you can sort of write or type in a more informal, friendly way. That example was probably a little easy. Let's do a more difficult one, a more challenging example. So these are the first few lines of the very famous play, Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. And so this is an old form of English. It won't be too easy to understand, but don't worry about that. I just want you to focus particularly on the part in yellow. I want you to think about that word, star crossed. Star crossed. It says, a pair of star crossed lovers take their life. What does that tell us about what's going to come later in this play? What do you think? So pause, read the whole text. Do your best to understand it and have a think about that and think, what predictions can we make? Try that now. Okay, so basically, Shakespeare is telling us that this is an unlucky or unfortunate couple and they're going to kill themselves. All right? And we might be able to guess that they have like problems with their family because it says two households, both are like indignity. And then it says an ancient grudge and civil blood. It's sort of talking about fighting in between the two families. They might have emotional pressure, they might have internal conflict. Like they don't know, are they doing the right thing or what's the best thing to do? How can they solve their problems? So we can make these predictions because he's telling us that they're unlucky and, you know, this is going to be a sad story. 5. Predicting Part 3: We can also make predictions from context clues. So particularly the author's choice of language, The words that they use to describe a person or to describe something that's happening in the text. Okay, so this can help us to predict their attitude or opinion. Now this is a little extract from a novel I want you to. The character that the author is describing. Is that character likely to be the hero of the story? Or the villain, the bad guy of the story? Here we go. I'll let you read that by yourself and have a think. The remarkable woman that he talks about, is she likely to be a hero or a villain? Pause and think about that now. Okay, the character is probably a hero now why do we know that? So she's described as elderly and wrinkled, but the highlighted words here, you can see them in green. They show those characteristics in a positive way. So a unique beauty, beauty of course is a good word, and unique means special, special beauty. And the lines on her face give her wisdom and resilience. So resilience is like she can deal with difficult situations and not give up. And her eyes sparkled like they're bright, they're not old. And dead eyes like that, they sparkle. And it invites others to seek solace, which means to look for comfort. All of those things are very positive attributes. Positive characteristics. We can make a prediction that, okay, probably this character is going to be a good character. Something else that we can do to help us make an accurate prediction is to predict based on the information that we have about the writer. Not about the characters, but about the writer. So here's the introduction to an opinion piece. An article that gives someone's opinion in a magazine. What predictions can we make about the opinions that the author is going to express? Let's read through it. The news that funding for local libraries will be cut by 15% next year has brought a variety of reactions from all sectors of society. For some, the move will free up funds which are vitally needed in the transport and healthcare sectors. While others are worried about the impact on the most vulnerable in our society. Here, former Chief Librarian Marcus Hall, shares his thoughts on the latest round of cuts. Okay, so we know our author is going to be Marcus Hall. What predictions can we make about his opinion of the cuts? Pause and think about that now. Welcome back. So we can probably guess that he's a former librarian. He worked in a library, so he probably likes libraries. So he probably thinks that cutting the funding, removing money from libraries is going to be a bad thing because that's his history. He wants to support libraries, so we can imagine, we can predict, he might say things like, libraries provide free ****** where people can learn. Libraries are open to everyone. Cutting funds could increase social isolation, people not meeting each other, staying at home, and only keeping to themselves. He might also say library staff will be affected by the proposed cuts. They might lose their jobs, and libraries are an important part of the community. These are just some of the things we could predict based on this man being a librarian. Predicting before you read the text is going to help you to better understand it and better engage with the text. Feel like you have a connection to it. If you do want to read the rest of that article underneath this video, you can find the text one in the resource pack and that's the full article. And you can find out if your prediction was correct. Something else that can be very useful for predictions is foreshadowing. Paying attention to foreshadowing. Now, what does that mean? Foreshadowing is when the author, or sometimes the director, if it's a movie, uses small clues and little suggestions to give us a hint of what is going to come next. And it's very common in literature in telling a story, like if you're writing a novel, okay? And it can include the following types of things. Symbolism, this means using objects or using the setting, like where the action is happening. Or actions that represent a particular idea. Those come early in the story, and then they might come back a little bit later. Some dialogue characters might discuss future events, or they make statements that give us a little idea of what could come next. Descriptive language, the use of descriptive details. They can also give us an idea of what might happen. Repetition, repeating, references to a certain concept, an idea, or an image that might be significant. It might be important later in the story. Or we could also look for character reactions. This is when characters show unusual behavior or they react in a very strong way, and that gives us some kind of clue or hint about what's coming later in the story. Something that I find personally about foreshadowing is I quite often don't notice it the first time that I read a story or the first time I watch a movie. Then I'll watch the movie again, or I'll read the story again and I'll notice it the second time. I'll, ah, the author used foreshadowing there. But if you're smarter than me, which you probably are, then you might be able to notice that foreshadowing the first time. And that will help you to predict what's going to come next. 6. Predicting Part 4: So let's do a little example of foreshadowing. So have a look at these extracts from a novel. What event do you think is being foreshadowed? Like, What event is the author telling us is going to come? So the cows were noisier than usual and had gathered at the far side of the field, everything felt calm, but in the distance a dragon stirred. We're lucky with the summer weather here, we never get so much as a light breeze. I'm imagining that's a farmer talking in England. That's what we always say. Farmers talk, they talk like this. They do a bit like the characters in Lord of the Rings. The last one is walking back to her car. Lisa felt a strange electricity in the air. Pause the video. Think about what event is going to happen, what is going to come. Pause. Have a try now. What did you guess? So I think it would be a storm. So if you predicted a storm, you're probably right. The cows were noisier and they were all gathered together on the far side of the field. And can animals know sometimes when a storm is coming? Right, So they behave strangely and everything felt calm. But in the distance a dragon stirred. This is a metaphor, It's not a real dragon, It's a metaphor for something big coming. And the farmer talking like this, he said, we always have the weather's fine, nothing to worry about. So you're thinking, hm, is he a little too confident? And then Lisa felt a strange electricity in the air. So that's kind of the feeling that you get when a storm is coming. That is how you might foreshadow a storm. So now we're going to do a little bit of practice of putting everything together In a minute, you're going to read text two from the resource file. The title is going to be Unseen Treasures. So before you read it, I want you to just pause this video and think about that title and predict what kind of text it's going to be. All right, and think about why you have made your prediction. So you might immediately have a feeling about, oh, it's going to be a um, but I want you to try to analyze that inside yourself as well. Why did you have that idea? Okay, pause and try to make that prediction now. Okay, so Unseen treasure is a short story. So did you predict it correctly? Let's think about some of the logic. We could discard any text types that don't have a title. That means we can just ignore them. A text message probably doesn't have a title unless it's very formal, like a really important one. But no, it's not going to have writing to your friends. You don't have a title to the message, do you? A social media post might not have a title, a horoscope. Anything that doesn't have a title, we can say no, of course not going to be that. Newspaper articles, reviews, and opinion pieces would probably have a less ambiguous title. They would have a title that's more clear about what this is about. Unseen Treasures could be about a lot of different things, right? Those other ones might be a bit more specific. The title is creative, it has some creativity. It feels more like literature. More like like a novel maybe, or something like that. It could probably be a story or a novel, but you might have predicted a blog post, you might have predicted a poem, and both of those would be quite logical. Remember that this is not an exact science. It just helps us to get the feeling of what is coming. Now what I want you to do is to read text two, all right? And this is going to be an activity where you do it by yourself, all right? Because this is all about predictions. And as we've said a lot, there's not really a right or a wrong answer here. It's just helping you to become familiar, to engage and understand the text better. So at times in the text, there are going to be some questions that encourage you to make a prediction about what happens next, all right? And I want you to stop reading at that point. Don't like cheat and have a look. I want you to take it seriously and try to make those predictions. And then you can keep reading and find out if you were correct with your prediction. Again, don't worry if your prediction is wrong. It's just a strategy. It helps you engage with and understand the text. That is going to be the end of this video. So now you can go ahead and do that reading. And just remember to use prediction predicting and predictions when you are doing your own reading. You can use them for newspaper articles, for reading journals, for reading short stories, for reading full novels, maybe even for reading text messages from your friends. It's very useful, but you have to get into the habit of doing it. It's something to try to very consciously do the first few times and then you'll gradually become a natural at it and you'll get better and better at it as always. Any questions, please send me a message. I hope this was useful. Enjoy reading text to Unseen treasures, and I'll see you in the next video. 7. Skimming & Scanning Part 1: Welcome back. In this video, we're going to be looking at skimming and scanning. So these are two skills you can use before you start reading the whole text. Let's go through and have a look. What are skimming and scanning? Skimming is moving your eyes over the text very quickly. To give yourself a general idea of what this text is about, okay, a general idea of the texts. Content scanning is also moving your eyes very quickly over the text, but this time you're looking for specific information. Okay, skimming, you're looking generally scanning, you're looking for specific information. And we often use skimming and scanning in combination. We kind of do them at the same time, and we use these skills all the time in real life. So for example, look at the sales receipt on the next slide for 5 seconds. Only 5 seconds. I want you to tell me what is the total that they paid. All right. So I'm going to count down for you. All right. There we go. So it was 363 99. So did you read the whole receipt to find that information? Probably not. Right. If you did, then that was not the best way. Instead, you scanned the text to well, the number to look for the information that you needed. And we can use clues like the bold parts and also the position of the text on the page, and they can help you to find what you're looking for. Skimming and scanning are very useful because they can help you to not only find the information quickly in real life, but they help you to find information you need in an exam situation. If you're reading a novel and you just want to enjoy it, this is probably not going to be very useful. But if you're taking an exam or if you are doing a report and you need to find something specific or get the general idea of a text, then this is going to be very useful indeed. The first method we can use is to preview the headings. Look at these paragraph headings from a mobile phone contract. We have ten different headings. Now my question for you is this, Which section should I read if I want to find out what happens if my phone stops working? If it has some kind of problem, pause the video, See if you can decide which paragraph we should immediately go to. Try that now. Okay, so I would say we first of all look at six device and equipment. That's devices like the actual the phone and then equipment is sort of the things around it, maybe the charger, maybe a Sim card, things like that. Okay, That's where we would be most logical in checking. First, we wouldn't check like the price options and pricing first for information about problems with the phone. We wouldn't check about privacy and data protection. You know, they probably have useful information but not the information that we need. So we've saved a lot of time by immediately going to the place where it's most likely we'll get what we're looking for. The next method we can use is to use the topic sentences. We can read the topic sentences, and those help us to get an idea of what the whole paragraph is about. So let's take a look at a short paragraph from a magazine article. I want you to think about which one is the topic sentence. Pause and read that now. Okay, let's take a look. Which one is the topic sentence? It's the first one. In recent years, there's been a remarkable trend emerging in the world of extreme sports, a surge in participation by older individuals. We could read just that sentence and know, okay, like most of this paragraph or even this section of the text is going to be talking about older people doing extreme sports. It's the first one. Usually the topic sentence will come at the start or near the start of the paragraph or the collection of paragraphs. If there's several paragraphs together, okay, it'll come near or at the beginning. And it tells the reader the main idea of what's coming. And if we scan just the first few lines of that paragraph, just the topic sentence, it can give us a really good idea about what the whole text is going to be about. It's a very, very useful thing to do. So that was one of the topic sentences from that article. Now we're going to read the other topic sentences from other paragraphs in that same article. I want you to tell me what the whole article is about. All right? Just by reading these topic sentences, give your best guess about what the whole article is about. Try to summarize the focus of the whole article in one or two sentences. Here are the four topic sentences for each of the paragraphs. Pause, read them, and write me a description of the whole article now. Okay, so I hope you read those topic sentences. I would say that the article is about the advantages and disadvantages of older people becoming involved in extreme sports because it does have some good points. And it also talks about some bad points in there. They have to take precautions and be careful and things like that. Even reading just the topic sentences, we can understand a lot at, about the content of the text. If you want to read that whole article, it's a cool article. You can look at text one in the resource file underneath this video. 8. Skimming & Scanning Part 2: Another method or strategy that we can use is reading the first and the last paragraphs. And this can give us a really good idea about what the whole article is about. Okay, this is a good way to quickly understand a long text. So let's look at the first and last paragraphs of this news story from the BBC. I want you to summarize the main points of the whole article, not just the main points of these two paragraphs, but the whole article. By reading these two paragraphs, there's the first one and there's the last one. Pause the video and try to write that summary now. Okay, so we can probably guess the following things. Sharing, which is a new word, is when parents share personal information about their kids online, it puts them at risk of being victims of identity crime. Somebody stealing their identity. To prevent this, parents should think very carefully before posting. And they should regularly check that their data hasn't been compromised, No one's found out their password or found out their information from an online database. Now again, you can read the full text if you'd like. Text two in the resource file. You can try to notice how many of those key points you were able to guess just by reading the first and the last paragraph. Another great technique that we can use is noticing the highlighted text in an article. Remember, we looked at the sales receipt. I only showed it to you for 5 seconds, but there were some parts in bold. And they helped us to find what was the total amount that we paid. Looking at things like the words in bold, and you can see the word in bold is in bold. Looking at things like that can help us find some of the important details. Okay, so in some types of texts, not all texts, but in some types of texts, important words can be indicated in some way. So they might be in bold, and we've actually got a list. You might see them in bold. You might see them highlighted underlined or also in italics. Which is when they're kind of sideways and it looks sort of fancy when you see it like that. We can focus on those words when we're skimming. And that can help us to understand the key ideas, the general idea, what this text is trying to say. So look out for those highlighted words, the bold, the underlined, and the italics. So let's do a little practice of that. So let's think about horoscopes. So if you're not sure, horoscopes is where you read about what's going to be coming up in your life in the next week or the next month, based on your star sign, like when you were born and things like that. Okay, so imagine that you have your horoscope and you can see these seven words which are highlighted. They're bolded as part of your horoscope. Okay, I'm not going to show you the full horoscope now, but imagine that these seven words were bolded. What would these words tell us if we were just skimming? What would they tell us about what the whole horoscope is going to say? Like, what's going to come for you this week? Would it be a very good week you're going to have, is it going to be a mixed week? Is it going to be a bad week? Are you going to die this week? What do you think is coming based on these seven words? So pause and have a think about that. Now, based on those words, I think you're going to have a mixed week. Because there's some good words there, but there's also some bad words. Some positive, some negative. And we can see now the text. So this is Aries, March 21, April 19. Get ready for a week. That's a cosmic cocktail of highs and lows. Cocktail here means a mix of good and bad, high and low. While challenges may arise, challenges is usually something difficult too. Will opportunities for growth growth generally something good. The celestial forces urge you to stay resilient. So you have to be like not give up, you have to keep trying. So that's kind of a good thing, but also it suggests that you're having some difficulties. Right. So mixed again, then we go down to embrace the lessons that come your way, for they hold the keys to unlocking your true potential. Potential is an exciting word. That means like you have the possibility to grow and be very, very good, to be more than you are now. Then it says, remember even in the midst of uncertainty, uncertainty we know is something where maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, but it's not sure. Uncertainty means it's unsure. There's a silver lining waiting to reveal itself. Silver lining means like you're in a bad situation, but there's a kind of a good result that comes from it as well. So we can see that there's a mix of good and bad. And if we were to just look at those words in bold, we would be able to make a guess that it indeed is going to be a mixed week. Now, of course, when the words are in bold, or they're highlighted or underlined or italics, it's easier to pick them out. Sometimes in more formal writing, nothing will be highlighted, nothing will be in bold. We won't have that help, But it's still important to pay attention to keywords. So that's our next method. So even if they're not highlighted, it is a good idea to watch out for, pay attention to keywords. If a text is quite complex, you can scan it and try to look out for these things. So first of all, content words, these are usually nouns and they can give you an idea of what the text is about. Multiple words related to the same topic. Like there might be different types of food mentioned, or different words related to business or to travel. Okay, There might be words that are repeated, so the same word is said several times. Or there could be uncommon or very technical words that you notice. Words that maybe you don't even know it, but you can tell that's like a type of machine or this is some type of academic theory. These words are going to help us to, again, get an idea of what this text is all about. And of course, this isn't an exact science again, but if we focus on these words, it can help us to understand the main ideas of the text. And it makes reading easier. 9. Skimming & Scanning Part 3: Let's do a little bit of practice of this. This is going to be quite difficult. I want you to spend between 30 seconds and a minute, but not longer. I don't want you to read through this very carefully for five or 10 minutes. Let's make this a quick exercise because we're going to be skimming and scanning. All right. Try to quickly go through this and see if you can notice some keywords. And try to figure out where this text comes from. What type of text is it? There we go, It's pretty big. Pause 30 seconds to a minute and see if you can figure it out. Have a try now. Okay, let's take a look. It looked a little scary, right? Is scary even to me. And this is from a government guide to applying for a visa. All right, so it's a pretty important high level document. How did the key words help us to deduce this deduce means like work it out. So we had some content words, we had applicant, we had regulations, we had document. Those are all things related to sort, government stuff and applying for stuff, multiple words related to the same topic, Immigration, embassy, consulate, then repeated words. We saw the word application and also apply and applying words, words that maybe they're not exactly the same word, but that they're from the same family of words. Requirements also require or required. So repeated words and some uncommon or technical words. We saw a bureaucratic framework and we saw amendments. So just looking at that, we know it's not like a text to your friend. Nobody texts their friends about bureaucratic framework. So that can help us to figure out, okay, this is something advanced, It's technical. It might be related to government in some way. So the idea is that we notice these keywords and we put our different things that we've noticed together. And this gives us a much better idea of what the text is all about. It won't make it a super easy text to read. It will still be challenging, but at least we know in general what it is that we're going to read. So we can be prepared, we have a general understanding, and that's a very important thing to help us get started. The next skill we can learn is scanning for numbers. This is a really useful one, a very, very good one to do. It's especially effective scanning when you're looking for a number, because if you imagine a page full of writing, full of words, it's very easy to see the numbers, right? They stand out on the page. They are easy to notice. And a text will often contain multiple numbers. So here is the process that you can try. You move your eyes quickly over the text. When you see a number, you stop, look at the words just before and just after the number. And then if it isn't the number that you need, you just move on. Move to the next number and do that again. So we're going to do a little exercise to practice that. So I want you to scan the text that I'm going to show you and answer this question and do it in 30 seconds or less, all right? Not reading very slowly and carefully. That's not what we're practicing. We're practicing scanning. So, how many visitors did Ikea receive to its website in 2020? That is our question. We want to find in this text the answer. All right. Pause only 30 seconds. Have a try now. All right. So let's take a little look. Did you find the answer? Scanning generally helps you to identify important numbers more quickly than reading the whole text. So here we go. We found 2020. In 2020 alone, the company had 839 million visits to its website. So if you were following the scanning routine, you would have been reading through very quickly and you see the first number you see is 1943. No, not the right number. 2021. No, not right. You go through 45 No, and then 52. No, 211,000 No. And then you go to 2020 and you say, ah ha, that's the information that I needed. You read before it. You read after it, and then you have the answer to the question. Now we're going to do some practice using a text. We're going to practice these different skills that we've learned. So you're going to get text three from the resource file and we're going to use skimming and scanning to help you answer the questions that follow. The first one I want you to do, I want you to go now and read that text. And I want you to summarize the text in two or three sentences. Okay, pause and try that now. Okay, let's take a look at what you could have said. This is just an example. You could have said, US, teachers are striking not only for better pay, but also for common good demands. This refers to things which benefit everyone in the school. Common good demands especially aim to address climate change and racial and economic inequality. So that's one way that you could summarize this text. Of course, there are other ways, but this has most of the key information. Next question, question B. I want you to scan and find what the following numbers are talking about. We have 2,500 587. You're going to quickly look for those numbers, read before and after, and see if it's the information you need. Pause and try now. Okay, let's take a look. So 2,500 CTU teachers went on strike in 2012. 580 schools were walked past during the strike. So they went on that walk, and seven days was how long the strike lasted. And the last question, why do you think the author put these words and phrases in bold? So we have common good demands. Collective wins, they can be sued. Political polarization, climate change, and racial and economic inequality. What do you think? Why are those words in bold? Pause and have a think about each of them now. Okay, so let's take a look one by one. Basically, they are the key concepts from the article. The most important ideas, common good demands, is the objectives of the striking teachers that are not about money. So that the other ones, the other things that they want to improve, collective wins is when you work together to gain something, they can be sued. So that's a very important legal idea, political polarization in America, there's a lot of political disagreement and it's connected to education and climate change and racial and economic inequality. So these are big issues that students and teachers are facing and teachers are trying to help with in doing their strikes, okay. So those were key concepts. So that's all about skimming and scanning. I hope that this was very useful for you. As always, if you do have any questions, you can send me a message. And I'll be waiting for you with more advanced reading skills in the next video. See you there. 10. Close Reading Part 1: Welcome back. So we've looked already at what we should do before we read. Now let's move on and talk about while we're reading, in the middle of reading, we're going to start with close reading. What is close reading? You can kind of guess what close reading is really. As the name suggests, close reading is a set of skills that help you to read and analyze a text in detail looking at the little details. This is the stage of our reading journey where we try to understand as much as possible about the text and particularly the structure of the text, how it's organized, what comes first, what comes later, and also the meaning of the text. Now, in your own language, close reading is probably pretty easy, certainly easier than it is in English. But have a think about a time when you had to read an important contract, or maybe an application form or another difficult document. Maybe it was hard for you to follow, or you had to read certain parts several times. You had to read them more than once. We've all been through that experience in our own language. Today we're going to see some strategies that can help us when we're doing the same close reading of a difficult text in English. Let's begin. The first thing we're going to talk about is link linkers. Now, linkers are those words or several words together that connect different ideas. And that's a really important skill to understand the different linkers because that can help us understand exactly what the person is trying to say when they're writing. To understand the meaning and also understand if we're looking for some information where we can find that information. Do we look before? Do we look after? Do we look in this one sentence? So here's an extract from a blog post. I want you to look at it and try to find three linking words. And I want you to think what function do they have? What is the job of those linking words? Okay, so you can see the text here. Let's take a look. I can't believe six months have passed since I graduated. Although I haven't found a job yet, I'm still feeling pretty positive. I've started a course to learn about coding, and I'm still volunteering when I can find the time. My mom's not happy with me though, unless I move out soon. I think we'll end up killing each other. So pause the video and see if you can identify the three words that connect different ideas. Have a try now. Okay, let's take a little look. Did you find those words? The three that we would say are linkers are these three. And unless although indicates a contrast, when two things contrast with each other, I haven't found a job bad. I'm feeling pretty positive. The two things are different. They are contrasting. We know, and it gives an extra thing. It shows an addition. We're adding something else has a conditional meaning like if not unless I move out soon. It means if I don't move out soon, my mom might kill me. Now these linkers are very important for helping us to understand the overall structure of the text and also the meaning of those sentences. Particularly unless I move out soon. If you don't know the meaning of unless it's hard to understand the whole meaning of the sentence. So now we're going to look at some more complicated linkers. Because I know that words and words like unless might be a little easy for you. Let's look at some more complicated ones. What you're going to do is to match the linker to their function. What they tell us, what job they do in their sentence. And these are more advanced level, all right, so we've got moreover such as likewise, accept, whereas, and indeed, And here are the different possible meanings, but we've mixed them up. I want you to pause and try to find the right meaning or function for each of these six. Pause, have a try now. Okay, so let's take a look. So first of all, moreover is when we're adding something, it's like saying and it's like saying in addition, such as is illustrating or giving an example. It's kind of like saying for example. Likewise is when we're comparing something, usually we're saying it's the same. Remember we have compare and contrast. Compare is often saying things are the same. Contrast is often saying things are different to each other. Except is qualifying. Saying like something, it isn't the same. Most things are like a except, whereas is contrasting, Saying something is different indeed is emphasizing something, it's making something even stronger. And we can also see those six in some sentences. So let's take a look. By the way, it's really important to see particularly linking words in example sentences to really get the feeling for how we use them. And then you'll be able to use them in your own writing. So first one, this plan will not address the problems facing our community. One bad thing. Moreover, there is no money to fund it. A second bad thing, So moreover, is giving the feeling of one extra something else. There was a range of afternoon activities such as hiking, swimming, and shopping. Okay, so giving examples. Heather is absolutely hilarious. She's very funny. Likewise, Mark makes a lot of great jokes. So again, it's adding something, making a comparison between two people, and saying, ah, these two people have something that's similar. Everyone except Martin is invited to the party. Sorry, Martin, that's bad luck for you. So, everyone else? Yes. Martin. No. Whereas the acting was only average. I was very impressed by the film's special effects. So, one bad thing, the acting, it was just not that good. One good thing, the special effects were very good. And so, one bad, one good contrasting we use. Whereas finally, people told me the park was difficult to find. Indeed I spent almost 3 hours looking for it. That seems like a long time to look for a park. But we're making the point even stronger, we're emphasizing. 11. Close Reading Part 2: It's super important to look at those linking words to help us to understand the meaning and the organization of a text. We've talked about that. The next skill that we're going to talk about is sign posting. When you see the word signposting, you might think about this, you might think about this way to Machu Pichu and over there to another place. What does that have to do with reading? In what way is signposting connected to reading? Let's take a little look. Sign posting expressions tell the reader where things are. They say which things have come before you read this sentence. Which things maybe are in this sentence and which things are coming later in the text. It tells you where to find some information. We're going to start with a simple example. I want you to think if these expressions talk about something that came before or something that will come, will come after in the text that we're reading. All right, so we've got as outlined above now, is that talking about something that we've already read before or something that will come later in the text we have seen then that before or after this will be examined in detail before or after, as previously stated. Before or after. Pause the video. Think about these ones now. Okay, let's take a quick look. Some of them are easy, some of them maybe not so easy. The first one, I think is a little difficult as outlined above the word, there is above, that's the key word. And think about when you're reading, you read down the page. If it's above, that means it's higher, which means it's before. It means you've already gone past it. Okay, next we have seen, then that's also before. The important detail is the tense we have seen. So it means we've already looked at that thing. It's the present perfect tense, we have seen that. Or as we have discussed things like that. So that's before. The next one, I think is the easy one, as this will be examined in detail later. Later of course, is our keyword there. And that means it's going to be after, it's going to be down. We might also see this will be examined below. Below is the opposite of above. Above means before. Below means down, it means later. As previously stated, previous means like the past. The one before. This answer is also before. That one was a little easy. Let's take a look at a more difficult challenge. I'm going to give you some sentences. I want you to imagine these are the sentences, the first sentences of paragraphs that you're reading in an essay. This is going to be an academic essay, It's pretty tough. I want you to think based on the information in each sentence. What would the order of these be? Remember they're just the first sentence of a paragraph, and we've not included the paragraph because there's not enough space on the screen. But I want you to imagine that you are reading this essay. What order would you see these five sentences? And you can see them there. I want you to take your time and think carefully about it. And on the next page, we're going to put them in order. But first, have a try yourself now. Okay, let's take a look then. The first one to understand the role of motivation in language learning. This essay provides an examination of three major pieces of recent research. This is giving a summary at the start. It's an introduction of what is coming in this essay. This essay provides an examination. This article explores the, it's saying what is coming later. Then the first key study, so you can look for those words like first, second, next, following on from that. Words like that that tell us the order or the sequence. There are, however, opposing views, however, is a linking word, a linker. And it shows that we're contrasting. We're saying one thing is true but the other thing disagrees, or the other thing is true, one car is red, the other car, however, is blue. So it tells us that before there was some other kind of information and the next information won't agree with it. Yet another perspective now yet is really important there. If we just say another perspective, that could be maybe the second. It's the same as however we could say, some people think red cars are the best. Another perspective is that blue cars are the best. But if we say yet another, that means that we're looking at a second disagreeing point. Okay? It's not the first alternative idea. We might say. Some people think red cars are best, however others prefer blue. Yet another preferred color is green. So it's like an extra one again. And then finally, clearly this essay has shown, look at the tense this essay has shown. It's saying about something that happened before. It's the present perfect. This essay has shown the crucial role played by motivation even though more research is needed. So this is going to be in the conclusion, this is saying what we've already talked about previously in this essay. Now that is a piece of formal writing. It's an academic essay, but sign posting doesn't have to be informal writing. In fact, it can be in almost any type of writing. Okay? And it's really good to help us understand colloquial language and informal expressions. So the kind of daily language that we use, talking to our friends in that kind of situation. So here's a text, we can see it here. I want you to see if you can find the sign posting expression that the writer uses to introduce their main point. All right, so read that, see if you can find what's the main point and what is the expression that they use to introduce that main point. Pause. Have a try now. Okay, let's take a quick look. So it would be, I'll cut to the chase. So all of the other stuff, like I don't know what I'm going to do because it's been ages, blah, blah, blah. That's just, it's not super important things. When we say I'll cut to the chase, that means get to the point without wasting time. Okay? So you can see that these sign posting expressions, they could be just one word. However, they could also be longer cut to the chase. I'll cut to the chase. Or why don't we cut to the chase even if we don't understand the whole message. If we understand this sign posting expression, we understand, okay? This is where the most important point of this text or this article actually is the person really wants is, do you mind asking Greg whether or not he's going to Anika's party on Wednesday? So, that's the real reason why the friend has written this text. Now, of course, there are lots of those different expressions and we're going to learn a few of them now. But as always, this is something that you have to notice yourself as well when you're communicating in English. All right, So it's good to keep a notebook. It's good to write these ones down. You can also search online. But first, let's take a look at some very common ones that I think will be maybe a little challenging, but very useful as well. So again, these are pretty advanced level. We've got six. I'll cut to the chase first things first. On top of all that, anyway, TLDR or too long didn't read. Last but not least, okay? And you can see the meaning, the sort of more formal meanings over on the right. So cut to the chase we already know is without further ado, the main point is like my most important thing is, and then you say it. I want you to look at the other five and match the informal expression to the formal expression now. Okay, let's take a look. I'll cut to the chase. We know first things first. The first aspect to consider is that's a very nice phrase to use in an essay or in a formal business e mail. On top of all that, what's more okay, remember informal? On the left. On the right. Anyway, my voice changes when I do a form without further ado. But of course you can say them. You don't have to make a silly voice. You can say them in a normal voice, TLDR. That means, in summary, TLDR is like, you want just things to be very quick. You want to just say, okay, we talked a lot. But here is what it actually the main point of what we wanted to say, not wasting a lot of time. Last but not least. Finally, now you have some really useful ones to use in informal situations and also in formal situations as well. 12. Close Reading Part 3: Next, let's talk about critical thinking. As well as understanding the meaning of a message, or the meaning of an essay, or whatever it is. We have to understand any indirect messages that it contains. And this could be talking about the attitude of the speaker, any implied meanings, so meanings that aren't directly said but the meaning is still somewhere in there. And also how reliable the text or the message or the e mail is. And these are all critical thinking skills. Okay, so let's do a little example. Kind of a fun example, I think. Consider the following message that you've received from your classmate at university. So do you think that everything that this person says is true? Does this person have a balanced opinion? Is it like a fair and impartial balanced opinion? Let's read it. Professor Jacobs is horrible. She's been completely unfair to me this trimester just because my final project was a little late. Now she says she's reducing my grade by 10% She's also asked me to go see her in her office. What a monster. So what do you think? Is that someone whose opinion is fair, unbalanced, or should we maybe think that this person is a little emotional? What do you think is definitely an emotional person? So we can't trust everything that this person says. Your classmate is angry. He's taking the situation very personally. Okay. If we consider the information here, we might say that the professor is being reasonable. Because the professors saying, all right, your assignment is late, so I have to reduce the number of points. Of course, I would say that because I'm like a teacher or a professor. So of course, I'm going to agree with the professor. But probably we can say that your friend's judgment is not that fair, not that balanced. It's a little bit too emotional and by thinking about that, we can judge how reliable this text is. And that's a critical thinking skill. So let's do a little bit of practice of that. I want you to read the following extracts from articles and messages and things like that. And so I want you to look at certain phrases. Maybe not the whole message, but certain words and phrases which we can't take at face value. That's a great expression. It means things that maybe are not 100% literal or 100% true. We can't totally trust those things. Okay, so take a look at these three. There's one, there's two, and there's three. So which parts can we not totally trust? Pause and think about that now. Okay, let's take a little look. So the first one, this incredible product will change your life. Say goodbye to dirty carpets with super clean. So here the writer is exaggerating, of course, unless you're someone who cares so much about carpets that this really will change your life, Unless you're that person, probably this is going to be an exaggeration. So it's saying that the reaction, the result you'll experience is bigger than it really is. If they wrote it normally it would be like this product will make your life maybe a little bit better. Maybe like 1% better. But then nobody would buy that carpet cleaner. So they're encouraging the consumer to buy, but we shouldn't necessarily trust it 100% The next one, it's quite clear that the Prime Minister has no morals at all. So this again is exaggerating, its overstating. The writer is saying, you know, that the Prime Minister is doing something bad. But again, it's not very interesting to read that is it The Prime Minister is doing something that's not very good. I don't think we would read that article. We want to feel like some sort of strong feeling. That's what will make people click on it. It will make people read and feel like, yes, this writer is totally correct. But of course, the Prime Minister must have some kind of morals. It's not, it can't be true to say they have no morals at all. Finally, Mrs. Hope marched into the classroom. Her face as red as a tomato. Now, unless she has some kind of Maybe like a medical problem. We can imagine Mrs. Hope's face is a bit red, but not as red as a tomato, right? This is called a simile. As red as a tomato, as big as an elephant. So we exaggerate using our language. Okay, so again, it's not something that we can take totally at face value. And you'll see things like similes and metaphors. Metaphor, by the way is like saying Mrs. Hope marched into the classroom and her face was a tomato. So we don't say like a tomato or as red as a tomato, we just say it was a tomato. Her face was a red tomato. Okay, so similes and metaphors. When we see those ones, we have to identify them as just a way of the writer making something more interesting to read, but it isn't totally true. Another part of critical thinking is thinking where the information came from. So what is the source of the information? When we know the source, we can kind of judge, is this something that we can trust? Or maybe, should we say Al right now, this is just rubbish. Read these extracts and see if you can think where they might come from. 123.4 Pause, read them and see if you can think what is the source. Have a try now. Okay. Let's take a quick look. So the first one, 80% of respondents expressed a favorable view. So this would be a survey or a questionnaire. All right. So someone's asked some questions. Firefighters were at the scene of the blaze. Blazes of big fire until the early hours. So this might be a local person who noticed it or the scene of the blaze. The language there suggests that it's a professional writer, because normally we wouldn't say, oh, look what a big blaze. We would say, look what a big fire. Just the use of language tells us, probably it's a journalist, the attitude of the staff was absolutely dreadful. And this again, we're probably thinking it's a personal opinion or an experience. Might be someone writing a review on the Internet of, let's say, a shop or a restaurant that they went to. After six weeks, only 13% of participants had lost any weight at all. The six weeks part tells us that this is some kind of a study. And then the participants is someone who takes part, who participates in some activity. This would be maybe a study, a research project, something like that. If we pay attention to the source of the information, that can help us decide, is this text quite balanced? Is it reasonable? Is it something we can trust? Or is it maybe just somebody angrily writing something like our friend talking about the teacher who's a monster. 13. Close Reading Part 4: Let's do some practice of this. So I want you to get text one from the resource file underneath the first video in this little series about close reading. Okay, so get text one first thing we're going to do, you're going to use your skimming, scanning, and predicting skills from the last unit to answer these three questions. So you're going to think, where does the text come from? Summarize, you're going to write a summary of its content in one sentence. Just one sentence. Easy to write. And what opinion do you think the writer is likely to express? Okay, so you're predicting what the writer is going to say? Pause and do those three things now. Okay, let's take a look. Here's my suggested answers. So where does the text come from? Probably from a UK magazine because you get the clue from the title and the topic, and at the end the magazine is mentioned. Attributed means like they mention where it comes from. Two, a summary. Now of course, this kind of depends on you, but a life coach talks about her experiences of living without her mobile phone for seven days, and then what opinion is the writer likely to express? So she's a life coach, so she's probably going to say positive things about the experience because that's what life coaches do, right? They help us to improve ourselves in some way, and probably not using your phone for a week would improve you. We also know that the advantages of disconnecting from technology is quite popular. That's something that a lot of people on Youtube and articles are talking about at the moment. So that's probably what she's going to say, that's what we can predict. Next, we'll do some close reading, and we're going to answer these three questions. What do the linking words in bold tell us about the connections between the author's ideas? Look out for those linking words in bold. And what do they tell us? What can we learn from them? Two, how can the underlined signposting expressions look for the line underneath help us to follow the text? What can we learn from those signposts? And finally, what is the author's aim in writing the text? What is the goal or the aim? And how balanced is her point of view? How can you judge the balance? Is it a fair point of view? Pause and do those three things now. Okay, let's take a look first at the bold ones. Despite, we know this one is a contrast. It's a contrast between living in a digital world and enjoying time without technology. Despite means when we're contrasting two things, saying that they're different. So is showing the reason why the author decided to live without her phone for a week and As tells us why. Again, it's a reason the author felt so free when she did that. And the last one was, while while is a way of acknowledging. You acknowledge that living without a phone isn't realistic. You say, well, it's true. I understand that living without a phone, you know, not everyone can do it, but it could be a good thing to try. While means yes, I know that sometimes this won't be the perfect answer, but it still could be useful. So those are the different linking words that we can take from this article. Then question two, how can the underlined sign posting expressions help us to follow the text and to sort of organize it in our own minds? So when we see that word after, that's telling us when the author started to say, okay, let's limit how much I use my phone. Okay, so we know that after it happened, that's when she started before, gives the order of the events. All right. So it helps us to organize this thing was first, then this thing, then this thing. And going forward, this talks about the author's future plans. So that's how those three sign posting expressions can tell us a little bit more and help us understand more deeply what's happening in this text. And finally, question three. What is the author's aim in writing the text and how balanced is her point of view? This is very much open to interpretation. Different people might have different opinions, but it seems in general like she wants to encourage people to reduce or minimize how much they use their phone. Because she talks about here are some benefits of not using your phone. And she also says, well, I had a good time. I enjoyed not using my phone. But then, is it balanced? She's a life coach, so she might be a little bit biased. Biased means like she's more in favor of one side compared to the other side. So maybe not totally balanced, but she does say, she acknowledges that it might not be for everybody, it might not be suitable for all people. So that adds some balance. So overall, it's maybe a little biased, but not like a crazy, crazy level of unfair and unrealistic. It's still kind of balanced. So those are some of the ways in which we can use close reading skills to help us judge what's happening in a text and understand the text better. Help us to find information inside of that text and make a judgment about, can we trust that text? In the next video, we'll be looking at some more reading skills, so I'll see you then. 14. Inferring Part 1: In this video, we're going to look at a really important skill for advanced English reading. That skill is inferring. So let's find out all about inferring. This is a skill that we use while we are reading. Not before or after, but during in the middle of reading. So what is inferring? Inferring means when we use the things that we already know to make an educated guess about something that we don't know. Okay, educated guess means a guess but based on good information, not just a, that one. That's not an educated guess. Educated guess is a great phrase. It means that we know something to help us make a guess. In reading we can infer and that helps us to understand or to guess the meaning of words that we don't know. Unfamiliar words. Okay? And we can use inferring to understand more about the tone of some writing and also its purpose. Inferring is very useful, very important, and very useful. So here's a very, very simple example. So look at this example e mail. It's from prize for you at Mooney.com And it says urgent. You are the winner of $2,000,000 So maybe a nice e mail to get, maybe not. So is this an important e mail? Not really, right? It's not really going to be an important E mail. If it says you are the winner, quickly send me all of your bank details so I can send the $2,000,000 to you. So how do we know that it's not a serious e mail? So we can look at things like misspelt words, words that are spelt wrong. And in that one, can you spot the misspelt word? Have a quick look. The misspelt word is winner. But it's not winner, it's winer. You are, the winer should be two ends. The over use of capital letters. So putting like whole words like urgent and you must open this e mail. Now that kind of thing that shows that it's not serious, it's not really important, and also an improbable message. So you're the winner of $2,000,000 Suddenly probably not going to happen, okay? And we know that this e mail is spam. It's not an important thing because we look at those different clues. So the really good thing about inferring is that if we practice it, it helps us to deal with writing, deal with articles or books where there are things that we don't know. It can help us deal with those situations in a more confident way. First of all, let's talk about context clues. And let's take a look at a little sentence. This is a sentence from a short story. I want you to look at this sentence. You can see it here. And think about using your grammar knowledge. What part of speech, what type of word, for example, a noun, or a verb, or an adjective, or an adverb, or a conjunction, any of those types of words. What type of word is missing? Just have a very quick look. What do you think judging by the whole sentence? What type of word do you think is missing? The sentence says, the elegantly dressed woman strode up to the reception desk and tapped her fingers on it. Blank. That one would have to be an adverb. The adverb is modifying the verb, which is to tap. It's the way that she tapped. We know that it's an adverb because it's talking about the way that she did the verb. Remember, adverbs change the way that we do a verb, but let's think about the meaning. So it's one thing, knowing what kind of word should be in a sentence, or to understand a new word if we don't know it already by looking at the grammar around it. But what about the meaning? So have a look at this. So the elegantly dressed woman strode up to the reception desk and tapped her fingers on it, test testily. So what does that word testily mean? It's an advanced level word. It's pretty high level piece of vocabulary. But we have to try to guess what it means by kind of looking at the sentence around it. We know already that it's an adverb. It's describing the way that she taps her fingers. But imagine that you can't use the dictionary. Okay, you can't use the dictionary. How could you work out what this word means? What logic could you use? Just pause the video, have a little think about it. Okay, so let's think about how we could guess this. How could we infer the meaning? We've already inferred that it's an adverb, We know and it has an L Y ending. So like doing something quickly or slowly here, testily. It's an adverb. But we also know that it's a way of tapping your fingers. And when do you tap your fingers? Maybe would do it in two situations, right? One you just a data, but you might also do it if you're impatient. Which one do we think this woman could be? She's walked into the hotel, she's marched up, she's strode up. Is she likely to be like, da, da, da, da, da, da? Probably not. Right? She knows that she needs something and she's impatient. So we can guess that this word means in a way that shows you are easily annoyed. So that's the meaning of testerly. We kind of use the grammar and we use the words around, and also the description of the woman to get a feeling for what kind of meaning testily could have. So that's the idea of using context clues. And now I want to give you a little challenge. So this is a diary from an alt student, and I want you to use those context clues, like the grammar and like the words around the word, and also just the things that you know yourself from the real world. And try to infer the meaning of the highlighted adjectives. Try to guess what those words mean. So we have overwhelming, we have bustling, and we have enchanting. Okay, so pause. Read that whole passage. It's not very long, right? Read those few sentences and see if you can use inferring to try to get an idea of the meaning of the words in green. Have a try now. Okay, so let's take a look. So first of all, overwhelming, it greatly affects your emotions. So we know this because over means like too much. For example, if you overpromise something, it means you promise too much and you can't do the thing that you promised. And so moving to a new country, it's not an easy experience, right? It's probably going to be quite an emotional experience. So our emotions get overwhelmed. And the second one is bustling. And so bustling means full of activity. So we know that London is like a very famous capital city, and so there's going to be a lot of people, right? It's going to be full of people shopping and tourists and going to work and all of those things. So that's the meaning of bustling. We use our knowledge of London to guess what it means. And then finally, enchanting, which means special or magical. So the writer said, the city is new and it's different, and we use those words in a figurative way. Of course, it's not actually magic, unless Harry Potter is around, then it might be magic. But most of the time, it's just special. It's special. And it gives us kind of an excited feeling. 15. Inferring Part 2: Context clues is the first way that we can have a guess, we can infer the meaning of something. The second way is to use the prefixes and the suffixes. What are prefixes and suffixes? You can see that prefix, it has that word pre at the start of it. What does that mean? It means before. A prefix is the little thing that goes at the start of a word. Like if you say un, for example, That means the feeling of not or no, happy and unhappy. The un, a prefix and suffix is letters that go at the end of a word. For example, the lee suffix in test helped us to understand that testalal was an adverb. Okay, it can be helping us understand the meaning or the grammar, but we can look at those words that have a prefix or a suffix and that can help us to infer. Sometimes in a text you might encounter a word that you don't know that has a familiar prefix or suffix. And here's what I want you to do now. This is a sentence from a hotel review online. So let's read it. And you're going to be looking at that word, misfit. See if you can think about the meaning of that. What could that mean? Based on the prefix? I'll never forget how the hotel staff and other guests made me feel like a total misfit. Here's my question for you. Do you think that the guest felt welcome in this hotel? Have a think about that. What do you think? Let's take a quick look. I'll never forget how the hotel staff and the other guests made me feel like a total misfit. Now here, we don't have too many clues in the rest of the sentence, do we? Because it could be something really, really good or it could be something really bad. If we replace this, they made me feel like a hero or a celebrity, then it would be a good thing. But they could say they made me feel like a total idiot or a criminal or a murderer, which would be a really bad thing. So in this situation, we can't get too much help from the rest of the sentence. We have to look at the word itself. And did the guest feel welcome? No, no, the guest did not feel welcome. Because we know from other words like mispronounce and misbehave, and many, many others, that the word miss is negative. Okay? And it means to do something badly, to do it the wrong way. It's the feeling of no, it's a bad feeling. So we're able to infer that misfit is negative. And the dictionary definition of misfit is a person whose behavior or attitude sets them apart from others in an uncomfortably conspicuous way, which is kind of complicated. But it's someone who doesn't belong in a group, someone who's different from everyone else, someone who doesn't fit in, misfit Mrs. negative, you don't fit in. Let me give you a little challenge now. Imagine you're reading a newspaper article and you see these advanced level words unperturbed, reaffirm, overstretch, measurable, each of those has either a prefix or a suffix. Now what can we learn from those prefixes and suffixes that could help us understand either the meaning of that word or the grammar of that word? Pause and have a think about those ones now. Okay, so let's take a little look. First of all, usually means something negative or not actually unperturbed here would be worried. If you're perturbed, it means you're worried. We don't usually use the word perturbed, we mostly just use unperturbed worried. But is a great example of when we have the feeling of no or non reaffirm Again, this means to say something again. To make it very strong, to emphasize that thing like we talked about, means too much overstretch. For example, in your job you overstretch, It means you demand too much of yourself. Or if you're like playing sports overstretch, It means you stretch your body too far and then you might get hurt. You might get an injury too much. Then measurable. We're looking at the end here. The suffix means that we can do that thing. It's the ability to do something. So here, measurable means we can measure that thing. It's possible to measure. And we can also learn the grammar of this and learn that a bull, if words end in a bull, they are always going to be adjectives that can also help us to understand the grammar of the text. And then if it's something really hard to understand, it helps us to organize. Now here's a little vocabulary test for you. So we've got these four prefixes and suffixes we have over and a bull. Which other words do you know that use these prefixes and suffixes. Just pause the video now. See if you can write down at least one, maybe more than one for each of these different prefixes and suffixes. Have a try that now. Okay, so let's see some examples. First of all, there's hundreds of examples, but here's a high level one we have unperturbed, but we also have it uncharacteristically. That means in a way that isn't typical, in a way that's not normal. So you could say he was uncharacteristically happy today, that normally he's grumpy or angry or sad or something, but today he was happy. Then do something again, reaffirm and also regain, get something again, obtain something again. Too much overpowering, that's too strong for you to resist. We often say that a smell is overpowering. Like blue cheese for example. Some people really like it, other people say that the smell is overpowering. It's too strong. And finally, a bull, there's so many of these, but approachable is a really good one. That means that you find someone easy, easy to go up to them and maybe start talking to them. 16. Inferring Part 3: Next we're going to talk about figurative language. Figurative language means when you don't mean exactly what you say, you use your language in a more creative way. Okay, let's do a little task. A little challenge. Often the words that you read in a text won't have a literal meaning. Literal means the writer says exactly what they think. They just say, look, it's a dog, it's a big dog. If they're using figurative language, they might say that dog is as big as a horse or it's as big as an elephant. So we know that really there's no dog that's as big as an elephant. It would be a scary idea. So that's figurative language, literal. Look, there is a big dog. Figurative. Oh my God, that dog is as big as an elephant. Okay, so very often writers use figurative language to explain or communicate their ideas. So let's take a look at this text that you've received from your friend. It says, hey, thanks for your message. To be honest, I haven't had a very good week. My car broke down. The weather is terrible, and work is killing me. Hope you're doing better than me. So take a look at that and see if you can figure out which word or which phrase is used in a figurative way. Not a literal way. Pause, think about that now. Okay, so the answer would be, work is killing me. Now, of course, the work is not actually good. Nobody is dying there. But what does that mean if we say work is killing me, your friend isn't talking literally. They've used an exaggeration to say that their job is very difficult. Let's take a look at a couple more examples of this. So these are more messages from your friend. Your friend likes to use figurative language, so my hair isn't doing what I tell it to. I was a tiny bit upset when she insulted my family. Fingers crossed, we haven't missed the bus So I want you to look at this and I want you to pause the video and think about the phrases that are in bold, in black. What do those figurative phrases actually mean? See if you can just pause and just try to work it out. Okay, Some of them might be easier than other ones, but pause. Have a try now. Okay, so let's take a little look. The first one, my hair isn't doing what I tell it to. What it really means is like my hair is a mess. I'm trying to make it do this thing, but it keeps going over here. I don't have a lot of hair, so I don't have to worry about these things. But of course, it's not really saying the person isn't talking to their hair and saying Excuse me, Mr. Hair. All right. Over to the left, please. No, I won't. That of course, that isn't happening as far as we know, so it's figurative language. Okay. And that's called personification. The writer is personifying their hair. They're making their hair seem like a person. And that is super common. It's a very, very common type of figurative language that you'll see. I do it a lot, it's quite fun actually. It's a good way to improve your own English writing and your speaking as well. It's very entertaining. The next one, I was a tiny bit upset. So this one really, it means I was very upset, very angry. And this is called understatement when you express your feelings in a smaller way than the real thing. Okay, So this is sort of the opposite of exaggerating. We have exaggerating when you say something is bigger or more than it really is. And you have understating, which is when you say something is less than it really is. Really when this person insulted my family, I was very angry. Very, very upset. Finally, this I think is the hardest. One. Fingers crossed, we haven't missed the bus. So fingers crossed is what you do when you do like that. And it means like you want to be lucky, you're hoping that you will be lucky. So the whole sentence here, canard means, I don't know if we've missed the bus or not, but I hope we haven't. So fingers crossed, I hope we haven't missed the bus. 17. Inferring Part 4: Figurative language is one great way of expressing yourself, but also understanding a text. The next thing we're going to do is to talk about tone. We're going to evaluate tone. The tone is like the voice that you use and the feeling that you give you're writing. We're going to read two e mails about a problem at work. Now, one of these e mails has a very formal, serious tone. And the other one is more informal and friendly, and more relaxed. The first one, just a quick message to ask you not to take other people's milk from the fridge. No big deal. But we all need our morning coffee. Cheers And the second one, Please accept this message as an official reminder of our policy regarding use of shared facilities. Refreshments are purchased by colleagues at their own expense and must not be taken without prior authorization. Which of these e mails is the formal, serious one? Which is the more informal and friendly one? And how do you know? You might kind of have a feeling about which one is which? But I want you to pause the video and see if you can analyze what exactly makes one of them more formal and what makes the other one less formal. Okay, pause. Have a try now. Okay, let's take a look. A was the informal and friendly one. Just a quick message. Don't take other people's milk from the fridge. No big deal. Cheers. The sentences first of all, are shorter. Generally, not always, but generally shorter sentences mean a more informal, friendly tone. Next, it's missing the subject and the auxiliary verb. All right, so this is just a reminder, but this person hasn't included that this is, they've just said just a reminder that missing the subject and perhaps missing the first verb is a really common thing that you'll see in e mails between two people who know each other well. Okay. If you wrote this in an exam, it would be considered incorrect grammar, but we very often use it when we're writing informally. Okay. The next one, simpler word choices. Simple words like ask words like fridge, that could be refrigerator. Fridge is the short, more informal version of that, informal expressions, things like no big deal. Another little thing to note is that quite often, if we're talking informally, the words themselves are going to be shorter. Longer words generally, not always, but generally longer words are more formal, shorter words are more informal. Now, there's loads of examples of when that's not true, but that's a general rule that you can look at. Have a look at this passage. For example, the longest word is morning. Seven letters. There's not too many formal words in there. More personal pronouns. We all need our coffee. It's talking in a friendly way about, about us, things like that. Finally, exclamation marks, cheers at the end. Generally again, you don't do that in a formal letter or a formal piece of writing unless you're really, really angry about something. But even then, it would seem quite strange in a formal E mail, that's usually an informal thing. Then we can look at the second one, which was the formal and serious one. And already you can see how many long words there are. Look at the last one, authorization, refreshments, and so on. A lot of long words, so the sentences here are longer. Particularly the second one. From refreshments down to authorization, there's more formal vocabulary choice, facilities, refreshment authorization, purchase. Think about what's the short and informal word for purchase. What does that mean? It means buy, right? So three letters, or eight letters, or nine letters. So another example of that, it's more formal word choice, really interesting one is the use of the passive voice. The refreshments must not be taken. It's not saying we shouldn't take the refreshments, It's making it passive and that makes the feeling of this more serious. More formal refreshments must not be taken. Also, not really many personal pronouns, words like words like things like that, of course, as we suggested before, no exclamation marks. 18. Inferring Part 5: We've looked at some different skills that we can use to help us understand a text. That's got some unfamiliar words or some sentences, or some parts that we don't really understand. Now we're going to put it all together. So I want you to go to the resource file and you're going to get text number one, okay? And in text one you're going to read it and you're going to follow these instructions. I've got four pieces of work for you to do. First of all, you're going to use the strategies from this section to infer the meaning, the words in bold. In that passage, you'll find some words in bold. What do they mean? Don't use a dictionary. Try your best to guess. You're going to find an example of figurative language, and what does that figurative expression mean? Have a think about it. You're also going to think about the tone of the letter. What tone does it have and how do you know? And you're going to write a 25 word summary of this article. We'll see if you totally understand what it's about. Pause the video and try all of those things now. Okay, so let's go through and take a look. First of all, the questions, conscientious means to be careful and responsible, and it's an adjective. Conscientious, very good word. Adventure is a noun, and that's an exciting, new project. It could be a new company, it could be like a new activity that people are doing. It's something new and exciting to embark on. Something is when you start you a journey or you begin a challenge, you begin doing something new. Dwelling is a place to live. The last one surpass is when you are better than something else. Like let's say that last month your colleague made $10,000 in sales. And that was like the best ever. But this month you've made 11,000 so you have surpassed your colleague. Okay, so those are the five pieces of vocabulary. Now something really important to do when you learn new words is to try to make your own sentences with them. That's going to help you to retain those words, to remember them more easily. So I want you to try to make sentences with these five words. Think about the grammar as well. Think about which ones are verbs, Which ones are nouns? Which ones are adjectives? Okay, pause. Try that now. Okay, let's see some examples. So she's a conscientious employee who always completes her work to a high standard. So she's very good. Her boss is very happy with her. We're sorry you're leaving. But all the best with your new venture. So the new project or activity that you're going to do, she embarked on her English learning journey many years ago. So she started it many years ago. Our ancestors lived in very simple dwellings. So we couldn't really call them a house. It's, you know, it's more simple than that. It's an older technology, but it's still the place where they lived. So a dwelling, well done. Your project really surpassed my expectations. It was better than I expected. So that was the vocabulary. Let's move on to the second challenge from that text, which was the figurative language. So the word that was used in a figurative way was the word have a haven. Literally, that means a port or a harbor, like where ships go. But we very often use it in English to say a safe haven. Really, it means a safe place. So that's the figurative meaning. Okay, so that was the figurative part and then the tone of the letter, so it's formal but friendly. So it has some complex vocabulary. It has some long sentences, but also it has personal pronouns. And it has quite positive language. The feeling of it is quite positive. It's somewhere in the middle. Formal but friendly. Finally, summarize the letter in 25 words, maximum. Of course, there's many different ways to summarize this, but here's the one that we came up with. I'll have to leave my apartment temporarily while the landlord carries out work to improve its structural integrity and appearance. That's what we understand from receiving this letter from the landlord. That is all about inferring when we read a text, when we see words that we don't know or we get to parts of the text that are hard to understand without looking at a dictionary. Now we know how to get past that difficult situation, so our reading is going to get better and better. So I hope this was useful for you. Any questions, please send me a message and I'll see you in the next video. 19. Questioning Part 1: Welcome back. In this video, we're going to talk about questioning. So let's get started and take a look. What is questioning? Have a think about this. One of these people, this guy and this lady is asking a question. And the other one is question, which is which. The guy says, when was this book published? And the lady says, why did the author include autobiographical elements in this chapter? Look at those two and think which one is asking a question, one is questioning, and what's the difference between them? Pause, think about that now. Okay, let's take a look. The man is just asking a question. He's just looking for some information. What was the date, what year was this book published? And we know how to do that. That's very easy. Okay, But the woman is questioning, which is critically asking herself a complex question to get a deeper understanding. So why did the author include autobiographical elements in this chapter? That means like some elements or details about the author's own life. So the lady is thinking in a deeper way about this book. So what exactly is questioning? Questioning? It helps you to understand and interpret a text. Because you're examining the ideas in that text or in that novel, the topics that it covers, the beliefs that there are in that piece of writing. And it requires critical thinking and thinking about things from different perspectives, from different angles, all right? And it doesn't really need you to ask other people questions. You can ask these questions to yourself, you can just ponder them, consider them, think deeply about them, all right? Just like with the other skills, it's not something that you'll always get right. And it's not really important to get it right or wrong to find the answer of why the author included autobiographical elements. The important part is doing the thinking so that we engage with this text in a deeper way. So let's do a little bit of practicing of this. So I'm going to give you the first little part of the Wikipedia page about France, which of course is a huge page. But don't worry, I'm just giving you a little bit of it. So here we go. I want you to scan this. Just read it quite quickly for about 30 seconds. Pause and have a try now. Okay, so that wasn't 30 seconds that I gave you. There you have to pause the video to give yourself 30 seconds. Hopefully you've done that. So did it look a little scary? It's quite a lot of text, right? It's a pretty long thing. But if we ask some factual questions, questions about facts, that can help us to isolate important information. Isolate means like find it. Say this here has some important information and it helps us focus on the meaning of keywords. So I'm going to give you the text again in a minute, and I want you to look at the words in bold. And I want you to think to yourself, what question could I ask myself about this word or this short phrase? All right. For example, if it was France, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. You see primarily there is in bold. So we could ask ourselves the question in green, which part of France are not located in Western Europe? Because when we think about France, we think, all right, it's next to Germany. It's, hold on, let me do my geography. It's above Spain, it's next to England. We think about Western Europe, but we don't think, oh, well actually it has some other parts of France, in different parts of the world, but we read that word primarily, and that gives us that extra bit of interesting information. We know that a minority, a small part of France must be somewhere else. So here's the article again, and this time we've highlighted primarily, but also some other words. So I want you to pause the video again a longer time this time and think about those other areas in bold. What questioning could you do? What deeper understanding could you get from those other words? Pause. Have a try now. Okay, so let's take a look. Here's some possibilities. Again, it's not right or wrong. Just getting deeper into this piece of writing. Overseas regions, that was the first one. How many of them are there? Is there just one? Is there 1,000 is it ten? Where in the world are they located? Are they also in Europe? Are they in different parts of the world? Or what? Exclusive economic zones number one. What does this mean? Exclusive economic zone? What effect does this have on the French economy? All right. Many islands in Oceana. And what are they called? What are the names of those islands? And are they inhabited? Do they have people living in those islands? So when we question those facts that we can see there, it sort of helps us with our prediction. Because it helps us to anticipate, that means like guess or figure out what's coming next in the text. And it can also help us if we have more research to do in the future, we can say al, right? So for example, the overseas regions of France. Let's do more research about that, Let's go a little deeper. Something else that's very useful to do is to think about the difference between factual information, facts and opinions. What I want you to do is to look at this review of a barber shop where a man got his hair cut. The barber shop is called Bob's. That's the name of the shop. And I want you to try to find which parts of this are facts. How many facts or factual information can you find in this review? Pause and find those facts now. Okay? How many did you find? Let's take a look. Really, there's kind of two, right? It's not very factual at all. We know that the shop is called Bob's. That's a fact. Unless he forgot the name and actually it's called Paul's. But no, we can say this is probably a fact. Bob's and the shop's simple decor, decoration. You could argue that even that is an opinion, but probably most people would agree with that opinion, it's towards a fact. But two, in all of those sentences, it's a lot of opinion and very little fact. So we know there's just the two facts that we could say. And that doesn't mean that this is a bad thing. But it's good for us to notice that this review is more heavily towards opinion than it is towards fact. For example, he didn't include anything like the price, the qualifications of the staff, how long your appointment is. You know, is it like two minute haircut like a sheep has where you all right on you go or is it an hour and they give you a head massage and all of those things. So there's a lot of facts that he could have included, but actually didn't. And again, it doesn't mean that we would say, oh, this is totally useless. This is something that we should ignore. But now that we've noticed that there aren't so many facts and that it's mostly opinion, it can help us to say, okay, so I'm going to take this maybe not totally literally, I'm going to say this is something where it's an interesting piece of data, but it isn't necessarily totally true. Another person might have a different experience of going to Bob's. 20. Questioning Part 2: The next method of questioning that we can think about is inferential, which is inferring something. This is where we're evaluating the text and we're trying to find something that is not directly said, it's not directly stated in this text, but still that meaning is there. All right, so it's a little confusing, but hopefully you'll see it in a minute. Take a look at the letter of reference that I'm going to show you. A letter of reference is when you're applying to a new job and the new job says, okay, get me a letter from your old boss so that I can see if you're a good employee or just a terrible person. All right, so this is the letter from the old boss. Have a think, is this employee a good employee or not? So here we go. To whom it may concern. I can confirm that Lisa Hauser worked for me from 15th of April to 21 June this year. She generally completed her responsibilities to an adequate standard best wishes, Helena jobs. So what do you think? This is a letter of reference going to maybe the new boss from the old boss. What does the old boss think about Lisa Hauser? What do you think? So I would say definitely Lisa Hauser is not a good employee. A few things we can take from here. Number one, it's so short. There's only two main sentences. If it was a good employee, we would expect a much longer letter. Probably ten sentences, maybe more. And also look at the choice of the word, particularly the word adequate. What does adequate mean? Adequate means not terrible. Not really, really bad, but not good either. It means good enough, but no better than good enough. It's like adequate is like the sound of like that. Not terribly bad, but also not good. All right, so these points can give us the idea that Lisa was not a very good employee. Let's take a look at another letter now. So this one's a little bit more detailed. It's not just two sentences. So a few questions for you to think about. Number one, what areas was the employee very strong? What were their good areas? Which areas did the employee have problems? What were the good parts and the bad parts? If you were the new boss, the new employer and you received this letter, what questions would you ask to the person who's applying for the job, to the new employee? What would you ask, say in the interview? So here we go. It's talking about someone called Paul. Pause the video, read the letter of reference and think about those questions now. Okay, so let's take a look. So the positives are pretty clear. Paul had a very friendly manner. That's the way of behaving with the customers, and a very good sales record. So he's good with the customers and sold a lot of products. His overall product knowledge was excellent, very good. And he achieved his targets almost every month. So good, not too many bad points there. When he arrived on time, Paul was also capable of producing excellent sales leads. He was certainly a popular member the team. Okay, Again, seems like those are good things, right? But sometimes if we need to identify the negative parts, we have to use the questioning skill. Because in this case, in particular in English, we don't generally include anything negative in a letter of reference. That's why it was so weird that Lisa's letter was only two sentences. That was a very bad sign, because you don't really say like Lisa was really, really, she's a terrible person. I hate Lisa. You can't say that. You have to be more professional. But there's no rule that says you have to say everything is super positive. You don't have to lie. So you have to find the part in the middle of lying to say everything's really good and being totally honest and saying everything's bad. So having said that, let's take another look, and let's look at the parts in bold. And what questions do you think the reader might ask if you're the boss, the new boss, what questions are you going to think about? When he arrived on time, Paul was very good. I'm not sure. His close relationship with colleagues always worked to his advantage. So what do you think? Just pause the video for a second, have a think about those two. What is the underlying message? What's the deeper message that the old boss is saying? Okay, so we might ask the question of how often was Paul late when he arrived on time? You know, if it was a normal employee, they wouldn't include that, right? They would just say Paul was very good. They wouldn't mention if he was on time or not. So when he arrived on time, gives us the feeling, oh, there's a deeper meaning here So we know, at least sometimes he was late because of that first sentence. And what was the problem between Paul and his colleagues? Was he too friendly? Did he have friendships that made him behave in an unprofessional way? They says, I'm not sure. His close relationship always worked to his advantage. What that really means is he had some problems because maybe his relationships were too close. What you can see here is that we're combining two different strategies to help us understand this letter better. We're using questioning and we're using inferring. And this is quite common. Quite often you'll use several different strategies to be able to really get deep into a piece of writing. 21. Questioning Part 3: The next thing we can do is ask ourselves evaluative questions. Those are questions where you evaluate the text. You make some kind of opinion or a judgment about the text. Let's do a little example. This is a short poem. It's called Missing by Ann Scott. And I want you to pause the video and read this to yourself. Just have a think about it. That's all I want you to do. Pause, read, and think about this one now. Okay, so it says I've hunted near. I've hunted far. I've even looked inside my car. I've lost my glasses. I'm in need to have them now so I can read. I loudly swear and I curse. Did I leave them in my purse? Are there behind the sofa, under the bed. And it goes on, and it goes on. First question, did it make you laugh? If it did, then maybe you're the kind person that this suits. But if you didn't really like the poem, what kind of person do you think would like this poem? This is the kind of question that we can ask ourselves. So again, there's no right answer. There's no wrong answer. We're just trying to get our own opinion about the text. We might imagine that someone who loses their glasses is going to enjoy this poem because they have that experience. And when we have that experience of something and somebody else writes about it or talks about it, we can really connect to that person or we can find that story very funny. Someone who loses their glasses might really enjoy this. But anyway, the idea of these evaluative questions is to question your subjective thoughts and opinions. That means like if you didn't like this poem, maybe that's not the only way to think about it. Other people might like the thing that you don't like, and other people might dislike the thing that you like. Or two people might understand a text in different ways. We can think about that from our own perspective and from the perspective of other people. And we can do some practice of looking at these evaluative questions and thinking about different ones that we could ask. If we were to read these types of texts, a novel, a product review, a magazine article, and a recipe. If we were to read these four different types, what different evaluative questions could we ask ourselves? All right, what could we ask ourselves that helps us to understand our own opinion And maybe to understand what other people will get from this piece of writing. So this is a difficult question, but just pause the video and try to have a think about it. Have a try at that now. Okay, so let's take a look. I think the first one a novel. You might ask yourself, can I relate to this character? And also you might say, can other people relate to this character as well? Or is this just something that's very suitable for me? Is the message communicated in an interesting way? So that's the judgment. Is it interesting or is it boring? Is it exciting? Is it like you've seen it before? How does this novel compare to other novels that I've read? Maybe by this author and other novels by other authors? Of course, there are 1 million other questions you could ask. These are just some examples, A product review, are these comments realistic? So like the reviews underneath, I always think this is my personal little tip. If somebody is writing like a review of a product and they write the full name of the product including like the right capital letters and the right spelling, that makes me suspicious. If they say the Tomo 3,000 is a fantastic machine and I think everyone should buy one, I'm a little bit suspicious. But if they say like this machine was very useful, I thought it was really good, then I think maybe I can trust this one a little bit more. But anyway, that's just my own personal thing. Does the review reflect my experience with this product or this service? So if you've had a terrible experience where you bought a product and it broke the first day, and you look online and everybody says, or one person says, this is the best quality product I've ever had. Can you trust that? Maybe it's true, maybe you got the wrong product, Who knows? But these are the questions you can ask yourself. A magazine article. So am I in the target audience? That's a super interesting question. Because for example, for me, as you know told you before, if the magazine is about shopping or about jewelry, then probably I'm not the target audience. Unless the magazine is called Jewelry Magazine. For people who don't like jewelry, that might be the one for me, but probably I'm not the people who they expect to read this article. Okay. So you can think about that when you're judging the article. Do I agree with the opinion that someone is expressing and do I know anyone who shares the same ideas? And then for a recipe, ingredients have any allergens that things that you might be allergic to. Some people are allergic to types of nuts or shellfish or things like that. How difficult would it be for me to follow these steps? If it says like then put water in a pan, you might think, oh, I can do that, that's easy. But if the next step is make a perfect cake in 10 minutes, then you might think, maybe I'll go to the next recipe and would my family enjoy eating this dish? So again, these are just some suggested ideas. But these are the types of questions that you can ask yourself when you're reading something in English to help you understand the text better. And also to help you figure out where this text could be in the world. Is this something that would be suitable for everyone or is it something that's very specific? Is it good quality? Is it bad quality? Does the quality depend on whether you're interested in this topic or not? There's so many things you can ask yourself, but when we do start to ask these questions, we engage more with the text and it improves our reading. 22. Questioning Part 4: Now we're going to do a little exercise. I want you to go to the resource file and I want you to find text, one text. As you read down, you'll see that there are certain points where there's a space and there's a cue. At that point, I want you to stop reading and ask yourself some kind of question. And that could be a factual question about some information maybe going deeper. It could be an inferential question like, what are they not saying that is still true? What information is being suggested but not said directly? Or an evaluative question like, is this something that's good quality or trustworthy? Or is it low quality? Or who is this suitable for? Okay, now of course, there are probably 20,000 questions that you could ask, but I just want you to do this yourself. And once you've done that, come back and we'll take a look at some possible answers together. But first, go and read that text. Now let's see some suggested answers. Honestly, these answers, the questions, could be anything. It's totally up to you, but here are some that I came up with in the first part. How do I feel about killing insects at this point? Relatively early in the article, it would be interesting to think, okay, what is my personal opinion? Am I totally fine with killing any insects or do I feel maybe a little bit guilty if I do that? What's my personal opinion number two, Do I feel sympathetic to the author's point of view so far? After you read that introduction part, you can consider your first impression. Has the author grabbed me? Has the author got my attention and started maybe to persuade me that he or she is right? Three, an interesting one. Is it a reasonable thing to refer to the cockroach as there's the story of the cockroaches behind the bread bin or something in the kitchen hiding. And the author describes it as he was hiding. He was totally still. Is that a reasonable thing to do? Because in English, normally we would say that any animal really, and particularly an insect, would be not he or she, he or she, we keep that just for humans or sometimes for pets. Like a pet dog, I might say he's been a good boy today or something like that, but a cockroach, you wouldn't normally say you would say it, but the author is using he. Is that a reasonable thing to do? Why has the author done that? All interesting questions. Next. Is this a fair comparison? So the author's choosing a metaphor that suggests that some people who disagree maybe are a little bit outdated. Some people who think that maybe like a killing insects or insects are terrible or things like that, those are outdated ideas. Is this something that's reasonable or is the author way ahead of like the rest of the world in how they think about animal rights and cockroaches and things like that. Then finally, what are the organizations that she mentioned? So this is more like a factual question going deeper and maybe doing some extra research afterwards to find out who or what those organizations are. So remember, it's absolutely fine if your questions were totally different. Well, it depends how different, I suppose, if your questions were like, when is this lesson going to end, I'm so bored then that's not an acceptable question. What time can I eat ice cream today? Also not an acceptable question. But anyway, you know what I mean. Any type of self questioning, whether it's factual, whether it's inferential, or whether it's evaluative, is going to be useful for helping you to go deeper. And I keep saying that phrase, but it's very important go deeper into the text. All right, so that's something that you can keep practicing as we go through this course and also in your own reading. In the next video, we'll be moving on to some different skills to improve our reading even more. So any questions, send me a message and I'll be waiting for you in the next video. 23. Summarising & Synthesising Part 1: Welcome back. So we're going to move on in this section to the skills and the techniques that you can use after you finish reading a text or a novel, or whatever it is that you're reading. We're going to start by looking at summarizing and synthesizing what are summarizing and synthesizing? First of all, summarizing, that's when you take a longer text and you condense it, you get the most important points and you delete or omit all of the less important points and you put the most important ones together into a shorter text. That's summarizing, making a summary, right? Synthesizing is quite different. Synthesizing is when we get text or we get information from several different sources. They could be different texts, different articles. They could be our own background knowledge that we have. They could be from a novel. They could be basically anywhere. And we bring those different pieces of information from different places all together and make one piece of writing that kind of includes all of them and gives the reader what they need to know, that is synthesizing information. So when and how do we use these skills? Why is this something useful to know about? So you may need to produce a formal summary or synthesis in a written way. For example, you might need to do it in an essay or an exam if you're writing a review of a book or a film or an activity at work. If you're presenting or leading a meeting on other occasions, you might do summarizing and synthesizing in a less formal way. Because those first ones are pretty formal, right? But it could also be less formal. And sometimes it would be sufficient. It would be enough just to make notes or to say your ideas out loud. So for example, if you are summarizing the last chapter you read of a book to kind of help yourself remember it before you pick the book up again and keep reading. Or you might be telling your friend about something, some gossip that you've heard or like a movie that you saw. You're still going to be summarizing and synthesizing even in these informal situations. So first we're going to deal with summarizing. And the thing that we have to do to start this is to identify the key ideas. Because if you've got a long text or, you know, two hour movie or something like that, you of course can't say all of the details. You have to choose the most important parts or ideas, or pieces of information. In our unit about skimming and scanning, we learned about topic sentences. Can you remember? Cast your mind back, what are topic sentences? Topic sentences are the sentence in a paragraph that talks about the main idea of that paragraph. So have a look at this paragraph. It's all about frogs. And I want you to see if you can identify, see if you can find the topic sentence, the sentence that has the main idea of this paragraph. Pause and read that now. Okay, So it would be this one. It's not the first sentence. Remember we said probably it's usually going to be the first sentence. But this one, it has a connecting sentence first. So the one that says this is however, far from the only interesting fact about these agile animals. So we know from that that in the last, the previous paragraph, they were saying some other interesting fact about frogs. But that first sentence isn't the main idea of this paragraph, right? The main idea is sentence number two. So they have a diverse and intriguing diet. It's all about their diet that varies based on their species and habit. So that's the main idea that this paragraph is talking about. And now what I want you to do is to take another look at that paragraph. See if you can find three key words or phrases that are all about the meaning of this paragraph. All right? Pause and try to identify just three, not five or ten. Just three key words or phrases. Have a try now. Okay. So I would say, you can see that we've underlined some words and we've bolded some words. We've underlined agile mosquitoes and rodents, and we've bolded carnivorous insects and sticky tongues. Now, which of those do you think are the key ideas? What would you say it's the words in bold. They're the most important. Now, why would we not consider rodents, mosquitoes and Agile to be key words? Just pause. A think about why they are not key ideas. Now hopefully you had a little read and a little think about those underlined words. First of all, before I give you a that answer, let's discuss why the words in bold are really important. First of all, carnivorous. Carnivorous means that they eat meat. This is going to be influencing a lot of the rest of the paragraph. It's talking about the different types of things that they eat. What are the things that they eat? Very often? Insects. We know that they eat meat or animals. The type of animals that they eat are insects. And how do they do it? They do it with their sticky tongues. We know what frogs do, right? They stick out their tongue. I'm not going to show you, I'm not that kind of English teacher. So those are the important words that they tell us story. Even if we got rid of all of the rest of the details, those words would still be able to tell us some kind of story about what frogs do and how frogs find their lunch. Whereas these words that the underlined words that we just looked at are not so important, they're more like extra details. So agile means you can move energetically, you can do difficult things, move fast, and change direction. But it's not talking about the frogs diet really. We know that the diet is the key idea of this whole paragraph. So agile is an interesting piece of information but not a key word. Mosquitoes, they're just an example of insects. So mosquitoes are not a key word either. They're just extra details and rodents that the text says, it's sort of exceptional or unusual for them to eat rodents. Again, it's not the main part, It's an interesting detail that a frog could eat like a small mouse or something like that. It's an interesting detail, but it's not the main part. If we want to make a summary of this whole passage, and speaking of making a summary of the whole passage, this is what I want you to do now. I want you to use the topic sentence and the key words that we identified. And I want you to either say or ideally write a two sentence summary of the paragraph. Okay? So I'm going to show it to you again. So you can see the green is the topic sentence, the black, the bold. Those are those extra key words. And I want you to write in only two sentences. What is this all about? Make a summary of this passage. Pause and have a try now. Okay? So you could do something like this. Frogs are carnivorous amphibians whose diet depends on their species and habitat. They most typically eat insects which they catch using their sticky tongues. There we go, we've got the main part, which is about diet, and we've got those three key details. We've mentioned carnivorous, we've mentioned that they eat insects, and we've mentioned that they use their sticky tongues. 24. Summarising and Synthesising Part 2: The next step to be good at summarizing is ignoring repetition. Repetition is repeating something, saying something again, saying something several times. In many types of text, it's quite common. It's typical that we see some similar, or even identical ideas being repeated. They say the same thing several times. People do this for several reasons. One, it can emphasize their point, and we'll see an example of that in a minute. It can also clarify something if you're discussing a complicated idea, you can repeat to make sure that the reader understands. It can also create humor as well. It's like little jokes that are created when you say the same thing several times. But if we are summarizing, we generally try to avoid that repetition. If we're making a summary, right, we're taking the most important points of a long thing and making that whole text shorter. Same point is mentioned several times. Of course we don't want to take it several times, we just want to take one of that main 0.1 of that repeated idea. Otherwise, we're not doing a summary, we're just rewriting the text. Okay, So let's take a look at this short text here. This is from a dog food advertisement. I want you to identify which idea is repeated. Okay? Which has, what is the repetition, Where is the repetition and how is the repetition done? Pause. Have a try now. Okay, the green part here is the repetition. So it's as happy, food is specially formulated to be good for your dog's coat. Now of course, dog's coat means it's fur, right? It's not actually, although some dogs do wear coats and they look very cute, my dog, on the other hand, doesn't like to wear coats. We tried to put him in a coat. He stands still like that until we take it off him, and then he goes and runs off. Anyway, you didn't come here to hear about my dog. The next sentence says, its select ingredients will ensure fur and leave your best friend looking great. The second idea in green, it's the same. It's good for your dog's coat. It gives your dog healthy fur. It's basically the same thing. How did they do it? They used synonyms. So that's words that have the same meaning fur. And they used a varied sentence structure. Good for your dog's health, ensure healthy fur. One of those starts with an adjective, the other one starts with a verb. And that's how they managed to emphasize that point. They remind us that, okay, this is really good for my dog's fur. So we're going to do a little bit of work about synonyms. Now, I'm going to ask you to match the adjectives in the list to their synonyms. Match the words to the other word that means the same thing. And these are all advanced level academic terms. And we're doing this for a couple of reasons. The first one is to help you with your reading. Particularly when you get to reading exams, the examiners will use synonyms in the exam, hide the answer from your little bit. It's really important to be able to identify synonyms. It can help you improve your score. But also, if we're writing a summary, we want to be able to understand which ideas in a text are repeated. Because then we know, ah ha, I don't need to say this twice, this is the same idea. Also, synonyms are just good for improving your English fluency and making your English just a little bit more sophisticated. Because if you are studying for an exam or just studying for your enjoyment, if you use the same words over and over again, like for example, I can do it, can do it, I can do it. It gets boring to listen to your English and you wouldn't get a high score in an exam. But if you can use synonyms, for example, I am able to do it, yes, I can take care of it. It's going to make your English much more natural sounding, much more interesting to listen to, and give you a higher score. That's why synonyms are great. We're going to do a little bit of practice, but I do suggest that you start to keep notes when you're doing your own reading. When you find words that are synonyms of other words that you know, make a note of it because it's really going to help you. Anyway, that's enough of me talking. Let's take a look at the activity. We have six adjectives on the left, and we have six synonyms. I want you to pause the video and match them. Have a try now. Okay, let's take a little look. So, the first one, rigorous is thorough. It matches thorough. Now, this is not the word through, notice it's T H O R, It's thorough. Thorough, and it means when you do something very carefully and make sure everything is correct, okay? Cogent is the same as convincing, so it's presenting your idea in a way where you can easily accept it or believe it or make sense of it. Cogent, convincing, coherent, and logical, a very important word. Coherent. If you're taking the Alts exam and you're doing some writing in it, you have to make your answer coherent. It must be logical, it must make sense. The fourth one is concise. Another great word, concise is the same as succinct. Succinct. And both of those mean, when we don't include unnecessary detail, we keep something nice and short, but it still has the key ideas. Just like a summary, he wrote a concise summary. Thank you for summarizing Succinctly, people might say in depth is the same as comprehensive, and that means it includes lots of details. These two are the antonyms, the opposite words of concise and succinct, and persuasive and compelling. It means they can easily make us interested and also persuade us, make us change our mind about something. Now, synonyms are one way of saying the same idea in a different word. And usually synonyms are just one or two words, like we saw just before. But another way to do that is to paraphrase something if you want to produce a written summary of a text. So like you're writing a summary, you can use different expressions for paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is saying the same thing, different words, but usually it's like a sentence or several sentences. And these are very typical in academic writing. For example, in a university essay. All right, so again, I'm going to give you some great expressions this time. I want you to match them to their function. What is their job in writing? So we've got the expressions on the left, In other words, lastly, the point being made is to sum up and all in all, we have some functions explaining what job they're doing. Pause the video and match them now. Okay, let's take a look at some answers. So in other words, first of all, is rephrasing something when you want to say it in a different way, and usually a shorter way, in other words. In other words, and then you say the short version. Lastly, pretty easy, right? It must be the final point, the point being made. That's a great phrase to use. This is introducing the main point, focusing on that main point and explaining it to sum up is a more informal way of summarizing something. To making the summary of what you've read or what has been written all in all, and that's when you're considering everything, generally that comes if you've been talking about two sides of the argument. Or later we'll see in synthesizing if one text says one thing and another text disagrees with that and you're looking at both of them and giving your own judgment, you can say all in all, it seems like text B has some good points, but I largely agree with text A. You're trying to be balanced about it. Now what I'd like you to do is to take a look in the resource file and look for text one. And I want you to try to write a short summary picking out those key ideas, all right, And getting rid of everything else. And see if you can use some of these paraphrasing expressions to make that short summary of the text one in the resource file. Pause and have a try at that now. 25. Summarising and Synthesising Part 3: So we've talked about summarizing and now let's take a look at synthesizing. Remember, synthesizing is when you don't just read one thing. You read several different texts or other types of information and you put them all together to give a general idea, a general picture of whatever it is that you're talking about. Okay, so you'll read more than one text to find the information that you need. And then we combine those ideas from the different sources and we call that synthesizing. So let's talk about the research and how you decide what to read. Okay? Because that's an important first step. So what different types of text would you consult for, information about these three things. So we have a local news event, so if you, let's say you wanted to write a report about it, what different sources of information, what different types of text could you read? And the same for any possible side effects of a medicine that you're taking or a breed of dog that you're interested in. See if you can write down at least three types of text that you could look at for each of those. Pause, have a try now. Okay. For a local news event, you could look at the local, also the national newspapers. So like if something happens in your city, there might be a lot of reporting. But that reporting might be a little different to how it's reported in another city, or in the whole country, or in the whole world. So it's interesting to see the different perspectives. Social media, you can find some, maybe we can't always trust it, but you can find some information on social media. And also you might look at messages from friends and family to see if they have any like specialist inside information, the side effects of the medicine. A scary idea, you can look at the instructions that come with the medicine. Usually it comes in, in a box, right? And you get, let's say it's the medicine. And a piece of paper that I usually don't read, to be honest. I want a terrible teacher for a reading course. But yeah, I usually go, oh, all right, yeah, I'll figure it out. But you could look at that piece of paper, you could look at the website of your National Health Authority, like the government website. You could also read medical journals. And you might be able to find different information, maybe even different opinions in those different sources. And then a breed of dog that you're interested in, ideally one that knows how to wear a coat and doesn't just do that. You could look at a book about that breed of dog, or about many different types of breeds of dog. You could look at different websites run by owners and enthusiasts of that type of dog. And you could also look at an online encyclopedia like a Wikipedia or something like that. So now that we know some different places that we can go to get the information, how can we combine those sources of information in a good way, in a way that's written? Well, here is where we're going to go a little bit over, more towards English writing, but English reading and English writing are pretty close to each other. Right? So I want you to read the extracts below, and I want you to think, what is the function of the highlighted expressions? Let's quickly read through them, as both Harmon and Greg suggest, that's the highlighted part. The influence of this policy remains to be seen. What is the job of that green phrase then? The consensus seems to be that the problem is here to stay, like the problem won't go away. But what's the function of the green part? What job is it doing? It is widely believed that this situation was an inevitable outcome of the law in question. It is widely believed. What's that saying? This does, not, however, align with my own research, which has suggested quite a different cause. Again, this does not, however, align with something. In what situation would we use that phrase? Despite some dissenting voices, the parties now seem closer to an agreement. What does that mean, dissenting voices? I want you to pause the video and I want you to analyze these five phrases. Also, of course, these are like formal English phrases. You can take these ones away when you do your own synthesizing and you can use them. All have basically a different function. So they should be pretty useful next time you have to synthesize some different sources of information. But for now, let's figure out what situation we would have to be in to use these different phrases. Pause, think about that now. Okay, so let's go through one by one. So as both someone and someone suggest, it's going to show two sources that agree about something. For example, one website might say that Springer spaniels type of dog are very energetic. And another website might also say Springer spaniels are very energetic. So we could say as the first website and the second website suggest, Springer spaniels are very energetic. Then the second one, the consensus seems to be that this is saying that most sources are agreeing. So it's not just two, this could be three, it could be five, it could be ten, it could be the whole Internet. All right, the consensus seems to be very nice phrase. The third one, it's widely believed that this presents a popular opinion that many people share. Now, it doesn't have to necessarily be correct. It could be correct, we could say it is widely believed that Springer spaniels are very energetic and the research tends to agree. But you might then say, it is widely believed that spring spaniels are very energetic. But my own research disagrees with that. You might use it to disagree. In fact, it's flexible, but the idea is that it's presenting a popular opinion and the feeling of it is it's more like regular people who have this opinion Then this does not however align with this means when we have a contrast between sources, let's say website says that Springer Spaniels are very energetic. Website agrees, but website says oh, when they get older they get very lazy and fat. Then you might say this does not, however, align with the view of website which says old and fat. Okay, And then finally, despite some dissenting voices, this one means that, let's say you've got 80% of people agree with something and 20% of people have a different idea. The dissenting voices are the 20% Those are the ones who actually, I think Springers daniels are lazy and not a good dog. But most people think that they are energetic and that they are a good dog. So those are all very useful phrases that we can use when we're synthesizing some information. Now I want to give you a little activity. So this is an amazing building, actually, York Minster, which is in the north of England, in a city called York. Which is very cool actually. If you visit England and you know, probably you'll visit London, right? Because everyone visits London. And London's pretty cool. But if you want to see some parts of the rest of England, then York is a really cool city to visit. It's an ancient city and it has a lot of old buildings, and this is one of the most impressive buildings. It's York Minster. I want you to use the summarizing and synthesizing skills that you've learned so far. Some of those phrases, the ideas, the techniques. And I want you to write approximately 100 words about the pros and cons of York Minster as a tourist destination. Imagine that your boss has said to you, okay, I'm thinking about taking a trip. And what about this York Minster place? Francis says it's quite good, but I want you to do some research and find out, is it really good? And write me a synthesis of your research. That's going to be your job. And you can find several texts in the resource file that are going to help you to do that job. Read those texts and write about 100 words. Have a try at that now. Okay, welcome back. Hopefully now you've had a try at writing that summary synthesis by reading those different texts. Here is a possible answer that you could have given. Let's read through it together. The consensus seems to be that a visit to York Minster promises an unforgettable experience. With its awe inspiring beauty, intricate Gothic architecture, and rich historical value. Moreover, York Minister is easily accessible, located in the heart of the charming city, making it convenient for tourists to explore this cultural gem. Some very nice vocabulary in here as well. However, both texts, 2.3 suggests that the increasing popularity of York minister has led to issues of overcrowding, especially during peak tourist seasons, which can spoil the experience for some visitors. The constant influx of tourists also poses a risk of damaging effects on the delicate stained glass windows and the cathedral's structure. Okay, so we're just mentioning those key points all in all then the minister can be a great place to visit as long as sustainable tourism practices are observed. So there we go, some of the pros and cons of York minister as a tourist destination and your boss will be very happy with you now. All right, so that is all about summarizing and synthesizing. I hope this was useful. Any questions as always, please send me a message and I'll be waiting for you in the next video. See you then. 26. Evaluating & Reflecting Part 1: Welcome back. In this video, we're going to be talking about evaluating and reflecting. So these are skills for after you've finished reading a text. So what are evaluating and reflecting? So you might remember evaluating from when we talked about questioning a few videos ago. It's when we think critically and we analyze the text and we think, okay, maybe it's, is it good or bad? Is it suitable for me? Is it suitable for other people, That kind of thing. Okay. And it helps us to reach our own conclusions or opinions by considering things like the context of the text, the credibility, like can we believe it? Stuff like that. Reflecting is when we think about ourselves as the reader. And this is good for things like taking notes, being self aware, understanding our own emotions. And it also helps us to note our progress, how much we're improving in our reading. The first type of evaluating that we can do is fact checking, a very important thing. So for certain text types, it's important to know how accurate any of the facts are. So take a look at this list of different types of texts and think, which one do you expect should have reliable facts, and maybe which one wouldn't have reliable facts? A news article, a friend's social media post, an instruction manual, a reference book, a diary entry, a legal document, and a government report. So pause and think which ones should be reliable and factual and which ones maybe are not. Have a try. Now let's take a look together then. The first one, a news article. We would hope that it would have true facts. They don't always depending on which newspaper or which TV station you watch, but we hope that it would a friend's social media post. We can't really trust the facts in that, that might be more of opinions or telling jokes or exaggerating, probably we can't trust that one. An instruction manual should be facts, a reference book. The kind of thing that you check for information should have trustworthy facts. A diary entry. When you're writing your own diary today, I did blah, blah, blah. That one probably doesn't have too much trustworthy information. That's more like opinions. You might not be being honest with yourself when you're writing that you might not have the whole truth of the situation. So those ones, we can't trust them as much. A legal document we definitely should be able to trust. And hopefully a government report we can trust as well. But then how do we do fact checking? How can we identify things that maybe are not that trustworthy? So let me ask you a question. This question is about this animal. What's the name of this animal? And what characteristics would you associate with this animal? Like, what do you think about the behavior of this animal? It's pretty cute. There. I find this animal quite cute. It's called a weasel. This is a weasel. It looks very cute. But in Anglophone culture, like in the UK, in America, Australia, it's usually seen as being kind of deceptive. It tricks you. Then when we talk about a weasel, if we call someone a weasel, we're saying you're being tricky. You're not being honest, you're trying to fool someone or lie to someone, or cheat someone. But still, how does that relate to fact checking? Let's see, we have to think about something called weasel words. Weasel words are expressions that we use to give a false impression that something is a fact and it can be trusted and it's accurate. So it makes things which aren't facts seem like they are facts. So it's trying to trick us, that's why we call them weasel words. So take a look at this advertisement, I'll show you now. This is the advertisement for home insurance. What do you think are the weasel words? The ones that are trying to trick us in this advertisement? Pause. See if you can find them now. Okay, so I would say that it would be up to, so let's read that part. New customers can save. Up to 45% Wow, that sounds really good, right? Save up to 45% your brain goes 45% that's nearly half. But the actual meaning of two is not exactly 45% It means it's anything from, from one or even 0.1% all the way up to 45% Probably not the full 45% Maybe 3% but definitely not 45% So the use of to the way that the writer has try to bring in that big number, even though he or she knows really it's going to be a much smaller number. That's an example of weasel words. Let's do a little exercise about weasel words. Here we have four different phrases. Studies show that most people know that experts agree that in some cases those are the weasel words. And these are the functions like what the writer is trying to do. How the writer is trying to trick us by using these weasel words. I want you to pause and to match the different weasel words, different functions. Okay, have a try now. Okay, let's take a quick look. Studies show that this suggests that research has been conducted. It's been done, but it doesn't give any details. It gives this confidence of, oh, this is scientific, yes, this is definitely based on science and real facts, but it doesn't actually tell us what those facts are. Most people know that it suggests something is common knowledge, but it doesn't prove that common knowledge. You know what it's like if you see, let's say you're buying a product and you're choosing which 11 product has only one review and the other product has 10,000 reviews. You probably will choose the 10,001 because you think, oh, everybody else must be right. We tend to trust the crowd. We trust people. And that's what this does. Most people know that really is trying to trick us. Experts, experts agree. It gives this idea that professional people who really know about it say this thing. Experts agree that this is the best product. Do they really? Well, we don't know in some cases. In some cases it's a weasel word because it's so open. Let's say that this was talking about 1,000 times. Some cases could be one of those 1,000 times, or it could be 900 of 1,000 times. It's incredibly open. It gives the feeling that something is happening a lot, but maybe it happened like one time and we're being tricked. They're using weasel words to make it seem more common than it really is. So it's really important for us to look out for those weasel words to see how much we can trust the information that we're getting. And a bonus tip. Try to avoid using these weasel words in your own writing because it's going to make you sound more credible. The more specific you are, the more kind of official and reliable you actually sound. So avoid these weasel words. 27. Evaluating & Reflecting Part 2: Next, let's talk about noticing logical fallacies. So let's do a little exercise. I want you to read this extract from a university magazine article. You can see there's an alien there. I want you to think how credible is the main argument, the main idea, how much can we believe it or trust it? All right, and why pause and answer that question now? Okay. So let's quickly read through it together then. So in other words, where is the evidence that aliens don't exist? The short answer, there isn't any. This demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that there must be extra terrestrial beings living somewhere out there. So what's the problem here? It's not very credible because the evidence that they're saying is that there's no evidence that aliens don't exist. So we could say that about anything, right? We could say there's no evidence that the universe isn't made of chocolate and ice cream. But, you know, just because there's no evidence, probably there is evidence. I'm not a scientist, but you see the point. Just because there's no evidence that it isn't true doesn't mean that it actually is true. So this is an example of a logical fallacy. So this is an argument that seems convincing. It's written in a way where at first we think, oh yeah, well that's true, but it has an error of reasoning. It doesn't follow the logic. If you, it is like you've made a tower and you push it and it goes, oh, and falls over. That's the logic. If there's a logical fallacy, noticing logical fallacies is a really good way to judge if the text that you're reading is credible. Is it reliable? Can we really trust it? So let's do a little bit of practice of that. So I want you to find one logical fallacy in each of the following four sentences. So remember it's information which seems like it's convincing, but it has some kind of logical problem. It's based on illogical reasoning. So the first one, either we ban all cars or the planet will be destroyed by pollution. Number two, you can trust this website because it's the most reliable source on the internet. Three, anyone who opposes this policy would surely have to be an unfeeling monster. And four, this is clearly the best strategy, as it's the one we've been using for decades. Pause the video and see what the logical fallacy is and how can you explain that logical fallacy, that logic problem in each of these four have a try now. Okay, let's take a quick look. The first one, either we ban all cars or the planet will be destroyed by pollution. The problem here is that there's not only these two choices, there's a whole spectrum of choices. There's probably 1,000 10,000 choices we could make. This is called a false dilemma when you're saying either we do this, this, but what about all of the choices in the middle? That's a false dilemma. Number two, I like this one. You can trust this website. It's the most reliable source on the Internet. What are they saying? You can trust this website because you can trust this website. So it's called circular reasoning. You can trust this website because you can trust this website. Because you can trust this website. Because you can trust this website. You could go around forever. It's a circle, all right? It tries to provide evidence for itself, so it doesn't make sense. Anyone who opposes this policy is an unfeeling monster. So this is emotive language. That's language that's very emotional. And it uses that emotive language, the feeling, instead of having some kind of solid reasoning. So it's trying to just say, if you disagree with me, you are terrible and awful. To make people afraid, I don't want to be terrible and awful. I agree with you. Then yes, this is another logical fallacy. It's called the appeal to emotion. Now, sometimes this can be useful if you're writing an essay and you want to persuade people using an appeal to emotion can be quite effective. But we're not doing a writing course, we're doing a reading course. So we have to notice when other people are using this trick on us, so watch out for that. And four, this is clearly the best strategy as it's the one we've been using for decades. This, it's old, so it's right, there's probably 1,000 or 10,000 or 1 million things in history that were used for a long time. But then we realized, oh, actually, you know, there's a better way of doing this. Yeah, this is appeal to tradition and it's another type of logical fallacy. Remember, just because something has been used for a long time doesn't mean it's right. 28. Evaluating & Reflecting Part 3: Another way that we can evaluate and reflect is to share our ideas with other people. We can share our opinions, the different ideas that we get when we're reading something. And it helps us to get the ideas from other people and also improve or change our own opinions based on how they sound when they come out of our mouths. And also just thinking about them more deeply. If you're taking a live class, you can share your ideas with your teacher, with your classmates. But if you're not doing that, you can also do this independently. So here's some suggestions. Take a look at these three. I want you to complete the word that's missing. To complete these three suggestions, Pause. Have a try to find those words now. Okay, let's take a quick look. You could participate in online discussion forums to share ideas about a novel that you've read recently. You can think about your own opinion. You write it, you read what other people have written, and it gets you deeper into that text. You could join an in person or online book club and compare your evaluations with those of the other members. You could use the comment section of news websites to see what other people think about the story that you've read. Be a little bit careful with those ones though, because people get quite angry in those comments. Um, so don't believe that everything you read is the opinion of all people who have read that article. Usually the people who comment there are the most angry or have the strongest feeling, either agreeing or disagreeing. You have to be a little bit careful with those comments, but these ideas will help you to adapt and change your own evaluations based on the new information that you get. And this is, as we said, something really important for reflecting. Let's do some practice. I want you to find text one from the resource file. The first thing I want you to do is quickly scan the text. Remember, scanning is reading quite quickly through it and answer these two questions for me. Number one, what kind of text is it? What do you think it could be? Would you expect this kind of text to have accurate and reliable facts and trustworthy information? Pause, think about that now. Okay, so I hope you've gone and had a look at text one. So it's a news article and we'd think that probably the facts in there would be pretty accurate and pretty reliable. The next thing I want you to do is to read in there more carefully and find three facts that actually might not be accurate. All right? Three things that are pretending to be facts. May be using some weasel words. And how do you know that these things are not necessarily true? Pause and find me three of those now. Okay, welcome back. I would say the first one is the studies show a startling drop in pet adoptions across all five boroughs. Which studies? Where do they come from? How many studies are there? Is that exactly what they show? It's very vague. It appears experts agree. This one is very weak. Experts, remember? Could be two, it could be 1 million, probably it's closer to two, it appears some experts agree. It also is a way of weakening the idea that you're arguing. It appears he is tired is a lot less strong than saying he is tired. It seems words like that, they make the idea weaker. It appears some experts agree is a very weak bit of language. And finally, it seems our cherished pets are paying the price too. So all of those expressions are weasel words. Maybe the thing is really true, but the way that it's written lets us think. I'm not sure if I can trust that this really is a fact. Question three for you about this same text. I want you to evaluate it and I want you just to make a general judgment. How likely do you think it is that this text is true? How likely is it that we can believe this story? Pause. Think about that now. Okay. So I'd say it's not true and I know that because we wrote it for this course. All right, so this information was invented. Now, of course you didn't know that for sure, but there were some clues that could kind of help you to get to the idea that this is not too reliable. Because usually if it's a newspaper article, there won't be someone on the camera saying, actually I made up this story because someone gave me some money to do it. You know, you have to make your own judgment in real life. So weasel words. That's one way that we can know there's a logical fallacy in there as well. Pet ownership is reduced and separately, there is a cost of living crisis. But are they connected? It's not clearly shown that they are and there's no source provided, no information is given about where this comes from, about the author, about the experts that they've asked. This information isn't given, this could have just been written by anyone at all. So overall, we can say this is not trustworthy. 29. Evaluating & Reflecting Part 4: The next part of reflecting that we can talk about is self awareness. Understanding yourself. Take a look at these two pictures. These are both of people reading, but in different contexts, in different situations. What could be different about the experience of reading in the first picture compared to the second picture? What do you think? The first picture we can see that there's a girl who's sitting on a stone. It looks quite cool, doesn't it? Although I do think that after a while, it will start to be a bit uncomfortable. But taking that aside then we have some people reading on a subway, maybe on the way to work or on the way home. The first situation, it's going to be much easier to concentrate, except maybe the stone is starting to hurt. But other than that, probably easier because it's outside, there's nobody around. It looks quite peaceful. It looks quite quiet. Whereas the second part, the second picture, there's a lot of people. You'll hear the next stop, you'll hear a lot of noises. People might be pushing you. So it's much harder to concentrate. And if you're in a place where it's easier to concentrate, you can notice your emotions more, You can be in touch with yourself. And it's easier to understand the text. It's easier to ask yourself questions like we did in the questioning part. And it's easier to make questions in an evaluative way to decide, is this something that's like a worthwhile story to read? Can I trust it? Is it something that is high quality? Will other people like it? All of those things that we've been talking about. It's much easier if you're able to be self aware because you're in a suitable reading environment. Another part of self awareness is paying attention to how much of the text you can understand. So sort of you're reading it, but you're also looking at yourself and seeing how much do you actually understand here. Let's do a little example of that. This is an extract from a short story. I want you to read it, and I want you to answer these three questions. Okay? So pause and do that now. Okay, So let's go through one by one. Did you understand the general meaning of the text? Maybe you did. You probably. It's talking about an old house, right? That's the Gerald, not all of the details but the general idea. It's an old house. Did you understand all the words in the text? No, you did not. Because three of the words are fake words. Sounds real. It's a cool worded and it's a fake word. So there's no correct way to pronounce it. Those are all not real English words. But we can use the context and some information that we know from our own studies to kind of guess something about these words, even if we don't know them. Of course, when you read a real story, there shouldn't be any fake words in there unless you read a story by Rol Dal, who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and many other very good stories. He quite often introduced his own made up words and kind of created them any. To come back to this, if we look at Goncole, we can see the L Y means that it's probably an adverb. So it's talking about the way that the house stands. So the abandoned house stood gole. My feeling of goncole is it would be like that, not quite straight, like the leaning tower of Pisa in Italy. Like that, but it's not a real word. Perked is a past participle, it's probably used as an adjective or maybe as a verb here, and the windows are boarded up like supus is a noun. Supu is before eyes, so it's going to describe I. So it's some kind of adjective. Again, it's not real, but we can use the placement and our knowledge of the grammar to get the feeling of, okay, this is an adverb or this is a verb, this is a noun, this is an adjective. And finally, does it matter if you don't understand everything well, it kind of depends on you if you're, you know, signing a contract or something super important. Probably you do need to understand almost everything. But if you're doing some reading for enjoyment, then you might be okay, not knowing words like gonkole and perked, and supo. And so depending on the situation, maybe you'd choose an easier book or an easier article to read, or you might check some new words in the dictionary, or you might just try to deduce or guess the words that you don't know. But the important thing here is that you are reflecting, you're thinking in a deep way. You're not just mindlessly reading, you're thinking about the skill of reading in a deeper way. When we're reflecting something really important to do is to think about the progress that we've made. At this stage of the course. You've learned a lot of different reading strategies for before, during, and after reading a text. I want you to have a little think now about one of the strategies that was new for you. Something that you hadn't done before, or something that you found very useful. Try to remember how you use the strategy. Think of a time, maybe you used it in an effective way and maybe you could consider other possible uses for that skill. What other situations can you use the skill that you've learned and you could choose from the ones that we've talked about. Predicting, skimming and scanning, close reading, inferring, questioning, or summarizing and synthesizing. What I'd like you to do is just in your reflection journal or on paper, or on your computer, just write down one or two paragraphs to describe your experience of that strategy. And by doing that, you're going to notice how much you've learned and also be more aware of the skills that you have and understand how you'll be able to use those more future. So just pause and do that for a few minutes now. Okay, so let's take a little look at what you could have written, something like this. This is an example, you could say. This was my first time I'd really learned how to use the skimming skill. Maybe you knew about it before, but you hadn't used it too seriously. In my job, I often have to analyze complex sales figures and send key information to my colleagues. This used to take a very long time and I worried that my boss thought I wasn't working efficiently. Now I know how to skim the document looking for figures. I can then focus in on the relevant information and identify trends more quickly Moving forward, I'm going to apply the same skill to my Alts reading exam when I take it next year. So that's the kind of thing that you could have written. But what was yours like? If you'd like to share yours, you can send me a message in the chat. Or you can also just leave a comment here below the video. Or of course you can keep it to yourself. It's up to you. But it's really important to notice this progress that you're making. And to give yourself a pat on the back to congratulate yourself for working this hard and improving yourself. Because not everybody does this, most people don't. So it's really good that you're taking these steps to improve. And finally, we're going to return to our reflection journals. So remember at the start of this course, you thought about your strengths, your weaknesses, and your aims for the course. I'd like you to go back and add another entry into your journal. Now I'd like you to include the following things. So a summary of what you wrote on the previous page, so you know your reflection about that task. You can make any comments on the progress that you've made towards the goals that you set. So do you feel like you've improved a little? Have you improved a lot? Have you improved in some ways, but not in other ways? So think about that. Think about any areas that you still have to work on that you still need to improve and anything else that you think is relevant as well. And we're going to add two more times to the journal during this course, during these videos. But you can also write your own things in between those two times as well. Or even after you finish the course. The reflection journal is there for you to use how you want, okay? So make sure that you make that journal entry now. And I'll be waiting for you with some exam related information in the next video. See you then. 30. Exam Section Introduction: Welcome back. In this section we're going to be looking at reading exams. So what is a reading exam? Now, that might seem like a very simple question. It's an exam about reading, because we've all taken reading exams, right? But let's think about what those exams are actually testing. So all the most popular exams are going to test your ability to identify the main idea, understand details, analyze the structure of the text, understand vocabulary, and compare and contrast things. And so all reading exams will test the skills that we learned in parts 23.4 of this course about before, during, and after reading. So you've already got a lot of knowledge that you need to be successful in your next important reading exam. So why aren't reading exams different? Imagine this. You're walking into the exam hall and you're ready to take your reading exam. How do you feel now? You might feel quite nervous, quite apprehensive, quite worried. You might have butterflies in your stomach. But why? It's because reading exams are in a controlled environment, so there is a limit, a constraint on your time. And of course you're going to get a score. Exams are assessed, that means it's very different from if you're just reading Harry Potter on the Beach or something like that. It's a very different type of reading. So let's take a quick look at why exam reading and normal fun reading are different. First of all, the purpose, like we said, you're going to be assessed, you're going to get a score, also the types of texts. Usually, if your exam is, let's say 1 hour, you'll have three different types of texts. A Science Business 11 from History. There's going to be different types of things that you have to read. You'll be anxious, you'll be nervous as very normal in an exam. And sometimes it can stop you from performing at your best. But all of these challenges can be overcome. If we have good preparation, by learning various tips and tricks and strategies, you'll be able to be much more confident when you take your reading exam. So that's our plan. For the next few units, you're in the right place. In the next few units, we're going to be learning all the best ways for you to succeed in your next reading exam. Now before we go on and talk about those different skills that you can learn, let's talk about some general advice as well as all of those different skills. Keep these tips in mind before the exam. Read in English, As often as you can read books, read the news, read articles, Whatever you can do, do an exam every day in the 14 days before the test. Now that could be a full exam or just one task from the exam, But try to get into the rhythm, into the habit of doing that. Because if you do that for 14 days, you'll develop some like mental muscles. So you'll be able to quickly switch into exam mode when you get into the real test. And you can keep a notebook to record your vocabulary, to deal with your reading strategies and so on. A notebook is very useful for tracking your progress. And then on the day of the exam, have a good breakfast, eat something, so you're not worrying about being hungry while you're in the exam. Don't try to do any more intensive study on the morning of your exam and get a good night's sleep before your exam as well. Make sure you sleep well. That's the, like the easiest way to make sure that you're in a good state. Pay careful attention to the instructions. Read the question instructions carefully. I know from my experience as an eels examiner that many people lose marks because they okay, fill in the gap and they'll try to fill in with three or four words. But actually it says fill in the gap with one word, but they didn't read carefully enough so they lose points. So really you must read carefully and also manage your time. And if there's a question that's just too difficult, skip it, don't worry about it, Just skip and go to the next question. Now a question that we've had a lot and something you might be thinking about right now is which exam is this course suitable for? And really all of them all reading exams. So as long as it's an exam somewhere between maybe B one and C two level, the strategies in this section are going to help you to succeed, okay. And all of the popular English exams around the world use almost the same methods of testing you. So you can use these techniques for I, else for Tofl, for the Cambridge two first or one advanced, for tick, for Duolingo and for many more as well. Okay. And they can also be applied to the exams that you take at school or at university. But also they can help you with your general comprehension and just enjoying your reading more. So just before we dive into those different types of questions, let's take a look at the organization of this section of the course. So we've divided according to question types. Okay, so there's different types of question. We're going to look at them one by one and learn skills for each one during each unit. Each part, each question type, we'll work together to practice some strategies and some techniques to help you answer those questions. In the resource file, under this video, you can find links to other sample exam questions, so you can keep practicing what you've learned and start to get ready for the big exam. Okay, that's all from me for now. So I'll see you in the next video to get started with the first question type. See you then. 31. Comprehension Question: Welcome back. In this video, we're going to look at comprehension questions. Comprehension questions, what are they? What do I have to do? Comprehension questions test your ability to understand some aspect, some part of a text. And they evaluate your ability, your understanding of vocabulary, of ideas. And also sometimes the author's purpose, like, why is the author writing this thing? And in the most popular in English exams, these questions are usually one of two types. We have multiple choice questions and we have true, false, or not stated, sometimes not given. Those are the two most common types. We have a number of different strategies and techniques that we can use to answer these questions. And many of them work for both types, for multiple choice and for true, false, and not stated. The first strategy that we can use is to underline the keywords in the questions. So we're not into the text yet, we're still looking at the questions, and we're going to underline key words. Even before you start to read the text, you can scan the questions. Remember scanning and underline the key words. These are usually content words. They'd be like nouns, or verbs, or adjectives, Not things like or two or, or things like that. You're looking for information that helps you to distinguish the correct answer from any distractors. Which are distractors, ideas that trick you into thinking that the correct answer really we're trying to separate the questions into different little boxes. All right, We'll do examples of this so that you can understand it, but the idea is to get each question into a separate box so that it's easy to know what the answer should be. Here is an example question from the Cambridge B two first exam. I want you to read the question and I want you to underline the key words. All right. Pause. Take a look at the question and the options and underline them now. Okay. Here is what I think it would be in the question itself, in the first paragraph. What is Caitlin's main point about the island And then in A we've got dangerous and cross, B is smaller is cut off and certain times D is difficult and live. The key words from the question, they tell us which information to look for, the main point, and where to look for it. The first paragraph tells us where the answer is and main means we're looking for the key idea. She might have some other ideas, some other points. But we're looking for the main point. We know what to look for and where to find it. And the key words from the options help us to quickly know what each of those options is about. A is about something dangerous, is about smaller. Or maybe the size is about certain times, it's divided, it's not together. D is about being difficult to live. Already we can feel like we're putting those four options into different boxes so that they're separate from each other. And we can easily remember, aha, this box is all about difficult to live and this box is about dangerous, okay. The next strategy is predicting. One strategy you can use while you're reading the question before you get to the actual text is to predict the vocabulary that you might see when you read the main text. And this can help you to focus on the appropriate part of the text and you can find those little clues that help you to reach the correct answer. We're going to keep looking at that same question, look at option, and you can see it here. So it can be dangerous to try to cross from the mainland. I want you to think, what words or expressions could you predict or might you expect to read in the main text? If this is the correct answer, let me say that question in different words. If option A is going to be the right one, what type of words and maybe you can think of three or four should we be seeing in the real text? Okay, pause the video and think about that. Now, hopefully you had a little try, wrote down a few words. I think it would be words that are related to dangerous, risky to cross, like travel across some water. It could be hazardous or a hazardous arrival. It might be an unsafe journey. Now, of course, that takes some time. Right? And if you're in an exam, you probably don't have time to go through. Okay, what words might I see? B. What words might I see? That's not a realistic thing, but it's a good thing to practice doing. And you gradually, you get faster and faster to the point where you can just go, okay, Did it a dangerous, dangerous, hazardous, unsafe, possible threat? So your brain goes like that and you'll be like a lot more focused and quicker to find the real answer. Let's do a little more practice of that in a minute. We're going to read the text itself. We still haven't started on the text, but now I want you to do that same thing for B, C, and D. For those three options, I want you to just have a quick think. What type of words, what type of language could we expect to see if B is correct? If C is correct, if D is correct? Pause. Do that now. Okay, Here is the text itself. The third strategy we're going to use is using a process of elimination. Elimination means getting rid of the ones that are right or wrong. What I want you to do is to skim the first paragraph. You can see it down here. The real text is longer, but our answer is going to be in this first paragraph I want you to think about is option A the correct answer? Remember that should be things like dangerous or unsafe, or risky, or hazardous, or things like that. So read that paragraph and tell me, is option a right or wrong? Do that now. Okay. Let's take a little look. So it's not so as we quickly skim, we can see that none of the words are related to anything to do with danger. So we can pretty confidently say, okay, this one is not about something dangerous, it's not going to be option A. 32. Multiple Matching Part 1: Welcome back. The next type of exam question that we're going to talk about is multiple. Multiple matching. So what do I have to do? What's it all about? Multiple matching tasks require you to match a statement or a question to a category or an option. All right, so it's matching things together. And they might use one long text or they might use several shorter texts. The most popular types of these questions are either match the heading to the correct paragraph. So it gives you a series of headings that describe paragraphs and the paragraphs themselves. And you have to match them or match the writer to their opinion or the writer to the thing that they said, like their research result or something like that. Okay, the strategies and the techniques that we use to answer these two questions are very similar. So let's get started. The first strategy that we can use is to find distinguishing words in the question. So what are distinguishing words? They are the ones which are unique to a particular question. So they help you to isolate the information that you need to make a correct match. So they're special just for that one question. They make that question or that sentence or that text different to all the others. So here is an alt reading question and I want you to look at the highlighted. Like the words in boxes, we can see origin, Calisthenics, supporter, and multidisciplinary. I want you to figure out by reading all four of the questions, which of those four words really are distinguishing words? Which of the four are words that don't appear in any other way or even in the same way, in a different one of the options or the questions. Okay, see if you can figure that out. Now, the first one, origin, is that something unique to all of these questions or is it something we can see in a different question or sentence? Well, actually we can because we have first use in question 31 says, the first use of Calisthenics, the origin of calisthenics, and the first use of calisthenics are not exactly the same, but they're very close to each other. That's not a distinguishing word. Calisthenics? No, it's mentioned in 2,930.31 definitely not unique, but Supporter. Yes, that is unique. That's unique to number 30. All right. So that one doesn't appear anywhere else multidisciplinary, that one, there's no other idea that's similar in any of the other questions. The other options that one is also unique and that gives us some useful information for deciding which paragraph or which heading, which writer, which author go together. Now once we found the distinguishing words, the second strategy is to make a prediction based on the structure of the even before you read the main text, you can make some predictions about the correct answers. Again, we're going to look at these four questions. I want you to think about two things and answer two questions. Remember, by the way, these are the headings of paragraphs and we have to find which of the paragraphs it's talking about. The paragraphs would be like paragraph 12345, or we might call it paragraph a BCDE. We match to these different titles or headings of the paragraph when we're searching for those paragraphs. For the right paragraph to match to 293-03-1302 Think about this question. Which two of those headings are probably going to be in the first half of the whole text? Which two of them are probably talking about? Two paragraphs in the first half? All right, which of these headings probably comes from a paragraph in the second half? Pause and have a little think about that now. Okay, so we could say probably that the first half would have the thing about origin, the origin of the word calisthenics. That probably won't be mentioned at the end of the article. That feels more like introducing us to this idea of calisthenics, probably in the first half, maybe even the first or second paragraph. So that would be the best place to start looking, 31 F again, why would they put the first use at the end of the article? Doesn't really make sense, right? The best place for us to look for that paragraph would be also at the start. But which one would go in the second half? The last popular supporter. We can't be sure, But it feels like if we're telling a story, we're going to say our acts are with the first use. This is where it comes from. We go through what it's all about. Then we go on the downward slope of it gets less and less popular. And here is the last supporter of it. At the end of the story, we can't be sure, but it's a smart place to start looking. The next strategy we can use is to scan the first and the last sentences. Remember scanning, reading over something quite quickly. Because time is limited, you might not have time to read the whole text in detail. So this is a good chance to use your scanning skills. So we're going to do an exercise with the same set of questions. We're going to read the first and the last sentences of a paragraph from a text, all right? So you can imagine the paragraph might have had maybe six or eight sentences. We're just going to look at the first one and the last one, and we're going to use the information in the first and the last to choose which of the headings matches that whole paragraph. Here are the headings. Again, here you can see the first one, the first sentence, that's the first sentence of the paragraph, and the one underneath is the last sentence of that paragraph, the same paragraph. Which of the four headings should match that paragraph? Pause. Have a try now. Okay, let's take a look. It would be 31. 31. The first use of calisthenics as a training method. Calisthenics enters the historical record at around 480 BC, a long time ago. We can think maybe the origin or maybe the first use. Then it turns out their tribal dance was building or inspiring physical strength and endurance. So if you're building your physical strength and endurance, what are you doing? You are training. So we've looked only at the first and the last sentences of that paragraph, and we can be 90% sure or more that this is going to be the right answer. So it's a very quick way of finding the correct answer for these matching questions. 33. Multiple Matching Part 2: Step four is to eliminate and then read closely using the strategies that we've discussed, 1-3 you'll probably be able to get some of the more simple, the easier questions quite well. You'll be able to get them quickly and also be confident about them, like we said, 90% or more confident. When you've got those ones, like we got 31, we can just eliminate it. We can put a line through it on the exam paper. And that means that the other options are maybe the harder questions. But we've reduced the number of different things that we have to look at. It makes our life a little bit easier. Okay? So we leave ourselves with a limited number of choices. So we can then do close reading. Remember close reading, this is how we're going to use it in an exam. We're going to read the paragraphs, Read the ones where we're still not sure. Even if we've done the first three steps, we still haven't found the answer. We're going to be looking in those paragraphs for a few things. Synonyms and antonyms of your distinguishing words. Words with the same meaning, antonyms, words with the opposite meaning. We're going to look for fixed expressions or idioms related to the theme of the question. We'll look for clues from time expressions saying like, what's the order of the events at first, second, before that, later. Subsequently, things like that. We'll look for changes in the tense, like from the past tense to the future tense or tone. So the way in which the writer is using their words to give a feeling. And these can show a shift in topic linkers. And those indicate like the contrast of two things are different or maybe two things agree with each other. And we'll often see those ones often, but not always, in the first sentence of like one of the later paragraphs. If you see a sentence at the start of a paragraph, like some people, however, disagree with the idea that blah, blah, blah. You might know the paragraph before this one was saying about the people who agree with the opinion that they're talking about. You can use it as a little clue and say, maybe I'll look at the one before and I'll find the agreeing side. Let's do a little bit of practice looking for those different tips and clues and things. I want you to read this paragraph. It's paragraph. I want you to figure out what the correct heading of this paragraph would be. You can see we've already deleted 31. Now we just have to decide 29, 30 or 32. Pause and try to find the answer now. Okay. So it was 30. 30 was the right one. The last popular supporter of Calisthenics. Take a look at the highlighted words in green. We've got 1950s Angelo Siciliano, and we've got some various other ones. I want you to think about which clues each of those highlighted words or phrases can give us. What help can we get from those different clues? Pause and think about that now. Okay, first of all, the 1950s, this is a much later date than when we saw about, what was it, 500 BC. Herodotus. This is much closer to modern times. We know that in the story it might be a bit, maybe the last supporter, Angelo Sicilian. This is a person, could be a supporter, absolute guarantee. But it's a clue. It helps us to find our way to the answer stemmed from traditional calisthenics. This tells us that Atlas used some type of calisthenics method. The last, the last is a big clue that's matching the wording in the sentence, the last supporter. And then the final sentence tells us that nobody followed in his support of the technique. He was the last one, nobody else continued after him. We can also see the word proponent at the end. Proponent is a synonym of supporter or someone who encourages people to do something. So there's a synonym in there as well. Notice as well, this is paragraph E. Now what that means, probably in the whole text, there might be maybe seven or eight different paragraphs is where is in the second half. This is as we predicted, it wasn't the first or the second paragraph of the whole text. It was much later because it was the last supporter, we're using our predicting as well as the other techniques to be able to find the correct answer. 34. Multiple Matching Part 3: Now if you have time in the exam, this is also very useful. This is a useful thing to do. It's not a quick way of finding answers that you don't have, but it is a good way of checking that the answers you've already found are the right answers. Or maybe finding that you made a mistake. This is again the difference between like a good and a great kind of score. This is rereading to check when you've finished the exercise. When you've finished whatever this set of questions is, you should read the text with your answers already in place. You can just simply scan. It doesn't need to be a very detailed check, but the idea is that you're seeing if the text sounds natural, you're making sure that it feels right, all right? Making sure that there are logical connections between the headings and the paragraph. Take a look at this. We've got the 32, the heading that we've already seen, a multidisciplinary approach to all round strength and health. Now we've also got the paragraph that we've chosen to be the correct match, which is paragraph I'm not going to tell you if it's right or wrong, this is for you to decide. I want you to just quickly scan, Don't look in too much detail. Remember, this is the end of the exam and you're looking through quickly. Okay, you're just checking. But quickly scan that paragraph and see are there some words. Is the language similar feeling in the paragraph to the heading that we've chosen? Number 32. All right. So have a try now. Okay, so what do you think? I would say yes. I think that these actually do match. I wanted you to think, by the way, I was talking, that it would not be a match, but actually it is a match. The highlighted phrases relate to the idea of multi disciplinary. Multi means many, right and discipline here is a type of skill. It's combining different areas of skill. The underlined expressions connect to the concepts of strength and health. Two of the key words from the question, we can see the green parts come bring two things together, a number of related traditions. Okay. And then the underlined ones, we have muscle development, strength and health. We have health and exact match. We have gyms, a place where you try to build strength and health. And we have beauty and strength as well. All right, so we can be pretty confident. Again, we're more than 90% confident now that this is going to be a correct match. Now there's one more tip that I want to give you. It's not the most high level, the most advanced tip. But it can be the difference between, again, a good score and a great score. That tip is guess. If you're not sure, guess so make an educated guess. What does this mean if you're at the end of your exam? And let's say there are five more questions where you're really not sure, You've narrowed down, you got rid of this one, which it can't be, you've eliminated this other one. It can't be that, and you've got maybe two choices. Then it's good just to have a guess, because none of the English exams that are popular at Ls and toful, and TE, and dual lingo, none of them use negative marking. You can't get less than zero for a question, which is a good job. There's no reason why you shouldn't have a guess. If you've got the question down to just two choices, you have a 50% chance of getting it right. May as well have a guess. Okay? If you're left with two or more possibilities, make an educated guess. You can use any clues that you've got using the skills that we've talked about. Also use, in this case, your background knowledge. And use your deductions, like using the skill of having you know a smart guess about any words that you're not sure, any unfamiliar words. So when you bring together all of that, you've only got maybe two choices. You can try to guess some of the unfamiliar words and you can use any background knowledge that you have. You should have a pretty good chance of guessing correctly. But the important thing is, of course, save this till last. Don't just go into the exam and say, yeah, that one, this one, this one, all I'm finished. That you're not going to get a good score or a great score if you do that. But I really suggest not leaving any question on any of those common exams unchosen. Don't leave any blank question, just have a try again. It's time for you to have a practice, have a practice of using these skills, these steps that we've gone through to be able to answer these multiple matching type of questions. So that's the link is in the resource file, you can check those out. And of course, as I said in the last set of videos, if you're going to take an exam soon, probably best to stick to the formal correct timings doing it in exam conditions. If you're just learning for your interest or you're gradually building up to taking an exam, then you can be a little bit more flexible with yourself and you can take a little bit more time to practice these skills. Also, remember that you don't need to use all of these skills in these techniques. These are just like we're filling your belt with all of the different tools that you need to be able to pass a really difficult reading exam. But just like with any tool, it's good to practice using it in a safe situation, in an easy situation with no pressure, and use it more and more. And then when you get to a difficult or a pressure situation, you know that that tool is ready for you. And it's the same with these reading skills and techniques. Good luck with that and I'll be waiting for you with a different type of question in the next video. See it. 35. Sentence Completion Part 1: Welcome back. In this video, we're going to be talking about sentence completion types of questions. So let's get started. What are sentence completions? What do we have to do? Sentence completion tasks require you to fill a gap with appropriate information that might be part of the text itself. Like they give you a text and there's some ****** or you might read the text and then there's some questions that come later. Sometimes there will be options for you to choose from, other times you have to find the answer in the text itself. In this video, we're mostly going to look at you have options, but you can still use the same techniques when you don't have options and you have to find the answer yourself. Okay, Now this is different from the use of English or the grammar type of gap fill questions that are quite popular in some English exams because those are all about your use of language, but these ones are all about your reading skills. They look the same because there's a gap and you have to fill the gap. But really the depth of them, like what we're actually testing, is quite different. Which strategies are we going to use? Let's find out. The first strategy we can use is to look at the context and the tone. We're going to look at a question from the PTE general exam. What I want you to do is to skim the paragraph and I want you to note down a word or two about the context. Where do you think this text comes from and then is it or informal, Is it positive or negative? I want you to think, how can you tell these things if you have a feeling, oh, this is pretty well, how do you know what's the reason for you saying that? Okay, so here we go. This is the question and also the three answers underneath. So pause and read that now. Okay, let's take a little look. The context. It's some sort of a letter or an e mail because it addresses the reader personally. It's saying, I was interested in your excellent article, your reference, things like that. It's talking directly to someone, okay? So it must be some kind of letter or e mail and the tone is formal or at least semi formal. It's not like two friends texting each other. Okay? And you can see some of the underlined words we have on the contrary, antics contributed significantly. These are all more formal language and the writer is talking positively about the article that you or the person the receiver has written. But they are talking about a negative personality characteristic, so they're saying the word antics in particular is negative behavior. Okay. So that's kind of what's going on here. It's a letter, it is pretty formal. And it's saying that the article the person wrote was good. But there's some negative behavior going on now, This doesn't yet help us to answer the question, but we're going to come back to this information later. Just remember it, keep it in your brain, and we'll come back and think about that a little bit later. Strategy two is using grammatical clues. This one is super useful. I really like this one. A lot of what I do with my students in class goes around these grammatical clues. I think it's really good. Sometimes one or more of the options don't fit into the space grammatically. So if you put them into that space, they won't make sense, the grammar won't be correct. That's true for these ones where we've got the B and C options, but it can also be true when we don't have any options, but we're looking at several different words, maybe in one paragraph, and we know how it must be either that one, or this one, or this one. We can look at the grammar of them and see, well, this one actually doesn't make sense grammatically. It must be one of these two. Okay? And some common problems with the grammar relate to prepositions. So that's like two. And in and of articles, a singular and plural forms. Is it one thing? Is it many things and also the tense of something? Okay. In this question, number 2052 of the options are wrong. And they're wrong because the grammar is wrong. Okay? So I want you to pause and I want you to find number one. Which two have a grammar problem, and number two, what is that grammar problem? Okay, pause and try that now. Okay, let's take a look at the answer. So, it would be A and C, we can eliminate them. They are wrong. Why? Why are ability to accept failures and holding on to successes wrong? It's because ability and holding are both singular. They're both one. Abi's not abilities. It's ability and it's not. It's holding, whereas B is delusion. It's plural. And look what comes after aren't characteristics. Delusions aren't they? Aren't It isn't. If it's said isn't a characteristic, we might say the ability to accept failures isn't a characteristic, or holding on to success isn't a characteristic. All right? But it's not, It's aren't. So we can learn that, we can quite quickly, I think, find the right answer. Of course, you can't always use grammar is very useful, but you can't always use it to find the right answer. So we do have some other strategies. 36. Sentence Completion Part 2: The next of those strategies is this one. Number three, identify distinguishing words in some cases, in many cases, maybe all of the options are correct grammatically. They all fit grammatically. What do we do? We can identify the distinguishing words in each option. Now, can you remember what are distinguishing words? We've already talked about them. If you've been watching all the videos as you should, you'll already know what are they distinguishing words? So they are the words which contain information which isn't included in any other option. The words which make this question unique, make it special and different to all the other questions. Let's do a little practice and remind ourselves about distinguishing words. I want you to find one distinguishing word in each of these three options, and I want you to say why it's distinguishing. Pause and try now. Okay, let's take a little look. I would say it's online stores and then we've chosen market for online is the only word that's connected to the internet, national chain of stores and market of the future. They don't specifically say internet future might have some relation to Internet, but it's not clear enough. Stores is the only one that's about a physical shop, like a place that you can go. Then the last one we could have market or we could have future. Both of those are unique, but the theme of what we're talking about here seems to be something about shopping, not necessarily just about the future market is probably the safer choice of the two. Now sometimes you might not choose the right distinguishing word or you might choose more than one. And there's nothing to worry about really. Again, this is just part of the process of reaching that correct answer. Okay? So don't worry if you know you can't find a distinguishing word, it doesn't mean you're going to get the question wrong. We're just trying to clear away all of the difficulty and make things as clear as we possibly can so that we can find that answer as quickly and as accurately as we can. Now that we found those distinguishing words, let's take a look at the first sentence of the text. And I want you to use your predicting skill to see if you can guess which answer is probably correct. And also think about how do you know, how are you making your guess? Okay, so here we haven't got the part with the gap yet. This is just the first sentence of this question. Okay? So I want you to pause and I want you to think, is it likely is probably going to be A, B, or C. Have a try now. Okay, let's take a little look. It's probably going to be a. Why? Because it's a website. Online, matches websites. It's all about the topic of the internet. Also, the word clothing related to fashion, online, fashion empire, ethical clothing, websites. At this stage, we don't know that it's going to be that answer, but it starts to take us in this direction. We already start to get a good idea by using those distinguishing words. Then I want you to read the second sentence. And I want you to check, were you right? Is option A still correct? Pause and try that now. Okay. What do you think? Still happy with it? I think yes. I think that this still would be the correct answer. Because if we look at the language just before the gap, it says, become a green matches online fashion empire. We could say the sentence, we want to become an online fashion empire. Makes sense. It sounds just about right. And green is more or less a synonym of Ethical. Not an exact synonym, but more or less a synonym. And we saw ethical in the first sentence, ethical clothing websites. So there's a match there. And there aren't any negative forms or opposites. Things where we say, oh, well actually it was that, and it surprises us and might make us think, or maybe it's B or C, we don't have any surprises like that. So we can pretty confidently say it's going to be A. 37. Sentence Completion Part 3: Strategy three is all about distinguishing words. We're going to stay on the topic of words and look at strategy three, which is, I think, connected because it's also about words and it's about disregarding or ignoring the less important words. In the last question, we saw the verb sache. This is pretty advanced level vocabulary. You might not have seen that word before, sachet. Here's another example of a sentence using sachet. I want you to use your inferring skill to see if you can figure out what sachet means. The sentence is, she sacheted into the room, turning heads with her grace and confidence. What do you think? What could sachet mean? It means to walk in a confident, elegant way, and you can see the person who's dancing just underneath me here. It's all about walking. Now that's good to know. It's nice if we know that word, sachet. But in the previous task, we didn't need to know the meaning of that word to be able to find the right answer. A nice word that was in there, it was an advanced level word, but it wasn't a word that was central or key to finding the correct answer. If we can learn to disregard, ignore the words that aren't important, and particularly if it's words that we don't know, then we're going to be able to save time and answer more questions correctly throughout the whole test. Basically, we want to avoid wasting time trying to understand words that aren't relevant to the answer. And we can see another example of that now. So in this example, we've highlighted some words which are quite advanced level and you might know them, you might not know them. But the question is, how many of those words can you disregard? Can you ignore? Because they aren't important for answering the question. So you can see the three in the boxes. So take a quick look at the whole question and the answers as well. And think about with those, those three words, I should say, how many of them are really important, or not important to find the answer for this question? Pause, try now. Okay, so I would say probably all of them are unimportant. We probably don't need to know the meaning of any of them because if you understand the underlined words, you'll know this is a text that's advertising a job for a teacher of photography. So you see the words, lecturer underlined, Diploma in Photography and Successful candidate. If we add those three together, what do we get? We get an advertisement for a teacher of photography. Okay, seeking a point and pursue it would be nice to know them. Seeking means looking for something, a point means give that person the job and pursue a career means to have that career, to follow that career. They're all nice to know. You can add them to your vocabulary now, but they're not central to what this question is all about, okay? So we shouldn't waste time worrying about them. We should focus on the more important words. So knowing all of that, we've got question 22. We've got three options, B and C. Which one do you think would be correct? Pause and think about that now. So it would probably be B. So why do we say B? Well, a fine arts is more like painting and things, that's not really photography. We can see that it's the diploma in photography that they're looking for some photographic expertise. And also in the last option C, proven leadership skills. We see that actually later in the question. The last sentence, experience, of course, leading is desirable. They wouldn't say the same thing twice in such a short text. It must be something different to that. Using all of that information, we can decide that B is the correct answer. 38. Sentence Completion Part 4: Another great strategy that can help us is pretty simple if we know some rules, and that's all about punctuation. Sometimes a simple coma or a lack of a comma will be enough for you to get rid of one of those options. Or perhaps choose a word or not choose a word. If there are no options, take a look at these linking words. I want you to think which ones are almost always followed by a comma and which ones are not or don't have to be followed by a comma. We have however, otherwise. Furthermore, despite in contrast, and although pause and think about when we use commas with these six have a try now, okay? So the first four would almost always use a comma, however otherwise. Furthermore, in contrast, they would almost always use a comma if we know that we'll be able to say a look at this gap. It has a comma after it. It probably will be one of those words. The word, although sometimes is followed by a comma, but usually it's followed by some words. Generally, we'll say that, that one wouldn't have a comma, despite is never followed by a comma. Again, this gives us really useful information for deciding which answer might be correct or at the very least, getting rid of one of the wrong answers. Let's do a little practice of this with another sentence completion task. So take a look at this text. We've got the gap in the last sentence and we've got three options. Now, after the gap, there's no, it just directly goes into, there is no extra agent's commission. Which of the options A, B, and C, can we disregard? Because it always does have a comma after it. Pause. Think about that now. Okay. So it was option C because besides this always has, it's the same as in addition or something else. Or furthermore, or moreover besides this. Because there's no comma in the text, we know it can't be that one. Now, I want you to use your other strategies that you've learned to try to decide which of the answers is the correct one. We know it's not C, but it could be B. Or it could be a pause and have a little think about that one now. Okay, let's take a little look. It was the correct one. That means it's because it's explaining a consequence. So it links the last two sentences pretty well. All right, so it's not just as well because just as well has a totally different meaning. It means it's lucky that so just as well, I brought an umbrella because it's raining now and it doesn't sound as natural when we connect those different ideas. So those are some strategies you can use to answer sentence completion questions more confidently and more accurately. Now, I strongly suggest that you go away and have a practice using the links in our resource file. Make sure you practice some of these sentence completion type questions and really try to get as familiar as you can with them so that when you take a real exam, you're going to be totally ready. And as I've told you before, if you're going to take the exam soon, follow the official timings. If you've got more time to prepare, take it easy. Just practice using those tools in your tool belt. And don't worry if you can't use all of them at the same time. The idea is you always have some kind of option for whatever situation you're in to make your life a little bit easier. Okay, I'll be waiting for you in the next video. See you then. 39. Gapped Text Part 1: Welcome back. In this video, we're going to be looking at something quite similar to the sentence completion questions that we saw before. These are gapped text questions, let's take a little look. They require you to fill a gap with a word or a short phrase, just like sentence completion. But they're different from sentence completion and multiple matching because we don't have any options to choose from. You have to find the information in the text. Okay, Now at the start of the previous video, I told you about how sentence completion often will give you the options, but sometimes they will ask you to find the answer yourself. So for the purposes of this course, we've kind of divided gapped text and sentence completion. In reality, they can be the same, but it's useful for us to learn how to deal with those two similar but different situations. We have the options, we don't have the options, okay? But very often, for example, in Alps reading you'll see what we've called gapped text questions described as sentence completion questions. Okay, So the name is not super important. The difference really is whether or not you have the options to choose from or you don't. Okay, so hopefully that's clear, it's a little confusing. The point is that the questions are sort of like that, they're not quite the same, they're not quite different, they're somewhere in the middle. Again, these are different from use of English or grammar, just like sentence completion, because they're testing your reading skills. Let's take a look at some strategies. The first strategy that we can use is similar in sentence prediction. It's grammar predictions. Before we read the test, we look at the questions. And we use our prediction skill to identify which part of speech, verb or noun, adjective, or adverb or something else will fill each gap. To do this, we look at what comes immediately before and after each space. This is an example from the outs reading test. I have a question. If I want to fill this gap, do I need a noun, verb, an adjective, and a preposition like two, or, in, or, of, or a number, And how do you know? Okay, only a small fraction of people have imagination. As, as Lauren does pause, think about what type of word that should be now. Okay, so what do you think it would be an adjective now? Why, why would it be an adjective? It's because as something always uses either adjectives or adverbs, As big as a horse, it as quickly, as quickly as an adverb, the structure that it's modifying is a noun. Okay, it's imagination, imaginations something. So what does an adverb change? It doesn't change a noun. Right? An adverb will change a verb. It ran as quickly as a horse. Run is a verb, this one, it's a noun. It ends in T, I, O, N, shun. So it's a noun. The word that changes it or describes it, explains all about this, imagination must be a adjective. Now, if you're not sure about the grammar, if you don't know it so clearly, if you're not an English teacher, but if you've read a lot, you might be able to use your feeling to feel which one is right and which one feels wrong. Okay? Again, it won't always work, but quite often your experience of English will help you decide, oh, this one doesn't feel right. Doesn't sound right to me. Okay. So for example, only a small fraction of people have imagination, as creatively as Lauren does, doesn't quite feel right. It's an adverb. Only a small fraction of people have imagination, as good as Lauren does, that feels okay. Just by using our feeling and our experience, we can probably get rid of a few words from the text where we were thinking, oh, maybe that goes in. No, no, it doesn't sound right. Now, let's do a little bit of practice of making those grammar predictions. I want you to take a look at the questions I'm going to show you. See if you can predict what part of speech, what type of word we're going to be using. And make a note of your suggestions, because we're going to use them later. Now, there may be some questions where more than one type of word is possible. Like we saw with the last question, it could have been an adjective or an adverb in the as something. Okay, so if there is more than one possibility, then write down both. Here are the four questions, ten to 13. Pause and try to make those grammar predictions. Now what do you think? Let's take a little look, shall we? 10.12 would both be either an adjective or an NG verb. Because it could be the auxiliary is very grammatical, but the auxiliary verb in the present continuous making an NG. For example, Professor number 12, Professor assuring maybe aphantasia is not an illness. Or maybe Professor Zieman is saying or claiming that one could work or it could be an adjective. A regular adjective is happy, is sad, is big, is wrong. Many different adjectives we can choose. We look at the and it tells us it's one of those two choices. We can look in the text for a suitable adjective or a suitable ING verb. Then 11, it's then, this is the end of the sentence. Nothing afterwards but another person's. So it's something possessive. We can only possess or have a noun. Another person could be idea, could be brain, it could be a lot of things, but it's a noun. And then finally, 13 is going to be with. And with is also followed by a noun, so that will be another noun that describes something in the mind's eye. Okay, so we're looking after the gap as well to give us some extra clues. But anyway, we know it will be a noun. 40. Gapped Text Part 2: Strategy two is to make content predictions. This is different to grammar predictions. In the grammar predictions, we were thinking what type of word could come. Noun, adjective, adverb, and so on. Here we're going to think meaning of word. Could this be, what sort of word could we be looking for? Okay, remember we still haven't read the main text, so we're still guessing and thinking ahead. Also remember that all of this, the more that you practice, will get quicker and quicker and quicker. So that you're not spending 20 minutes doing it, you're spending maybe 10 seconds doing it. Okay, so let's talk about content. So it can be clear from the content words what kind of information is going to fill the gap. And you could come up with a category of words or even some specific suggestions. So, let's go back to question nine. So, this was the have imagination as Lauren does. Okay, I want you to think of five to six adjectives. I want you to write them down on your list. Adjectives that based on the content, the meaning of this sentence could fill this gap. Okay, what possibilities could there be? All right, For example, it wouldn't be an adjective like red. Only a small fraction of people have imagination as red. It doesn't make sense. What type of adjective could make sense? Pause. Try to make a list of five or six now. Okay, you could think of words like creative, maybe active, colorful, unconventional, limited, dull. There could be good words, there could be bad words. Boring, interesting, exciting. There's many different words that we could choose. But the important thing is that all of those words are words that would describe someone's imagination. Okay, so that's the type of word that we can guess and we can start to look in the text to find that kind of word if we've thought about it beforehand. Now if you look at a question and you think, oh, I'm pretty sure it's going to be this word. You can write it down. Maybe not in on the question paper itself, but write it next to it. Write it in your notes. Okay? If you write it in the space, you might then forget and you think you've got it and it turns out to be something else. But that's only if you have a very clear idea. Mostly here, we're just going to be thinking about the possibilities which is going to help us when we get to the reading part later. Okay, we're training our brain. We're priming ourselves to be able to find the right possible answer. Okay, so we're going to use this strategy to predict maybe one or two words that could fill the other gaps. Now sometimes this is difficult. There could be many different possibilities. But sometimes you'll be surprised how easy it is to have a good idea of the correct answer even before you read the text. So it's pretty useful, right? Even if this only works 50% of the time, that means that 50% of the time the questions are easy, which I think that's a good situation. Pause the video, try to think of one or two possible words that could fill these ******. All right, have a try. Now let's take a look at some possibilities then. First of all, for number ten, hyperphantasia is to aphantasia. So we can see that the words are similar. We might choose words like similar, or maybe they're the opposite. Maybe it's different. Or maybe one of them causes the other one. So we say leading to aphantasia. Okay. Again, I'm not saying if any of these are right or wrong, this is just the kind of word that we could guess. 11, someone's vivid scene could be another person, it's probably going to be two words or something like that. Boring image, maybe cloudy idea, vague view. The reason that we're saying those types of words is that the content before it leads us to think we're making a comparison. One person's vivid scene, then we say it's going to be the opposite. Could be another person's something bad. There's a famous phrase in English, one man's meat is another man's poison. Okay. And quite often we use like an echo of that phrase. One man's something, one person's something is another person's opposite thing. Okay, so those are some possibilities then. 12 we're going to be looking for maybe an adjective or ING again, Professor Zieman is maybe he's sure, certain or maybe the opposite. Unconvinced. Or maybe a word like saying, like arguing that aphantasia is not an illness. Until we read the text, we don't, we don't know if he thinks it is an illness, if he thinks it isn't an illness. But at least we have an idea looking at the sentence that it's probably one of those two sides. We'll be looking for synonyms of the words that we've predicted, or maybe even the actual words that we've predicted. Finally, 13, pretty hard. There's a lot of possibilities for 13 like we say this. And all of the tactics and strategies can't work 100% of the time. But I think we can look at 10:11, and 12 and say we've got a pretty good idea for those three. Let's move on and see what the next strategy is. Now the next strategy is simple, but it's like maybe the most important thing I'll tell you in this whole section about exams, pay close attention to the instructions. All right? So look at the instructions for these two different ILs gapped text activities. Okay? What important difference can you see? Here's the first, here's the second pause and see if you can notice the important difference now. Okay, did you see it? You wouldn't believe how many people lose marks in Ls with mistakes like this. I hope you noticed that the first one says no more than three words and the second one says no more than two words. That's a very important difference. The maximum number of words is very important. If you write four words for the first one, you won't get any marks. If you write three, or four, or five words for the second set of questions, no marks. It's a simple thing to say, but it's super important. Pay attention to the instructions. 41. Gapped Text Part 3: The fourth strategy we're going to use is one we've seen before scanning, so we're going to scan to find the right section of the text. Okay. Remember the unit where we talked about scanning? Scanning is when we read the text quickly and we're looking for a particular piece of information. And there it is. We did it about the receipt with how much someone had spent in all of the popular exams that have these types of activities. There will be one section of the text, one section of the whole thing that has most of the information. Often the questions will be in the same order. If you find a useful piece of information from the first question, you know that the next question is going to be under that. And under under that's not always true, but quite often that is true. It's really useful to quickly scan to save yourself time reading through everything carefully. Instead, you go straight to the paragraph or the section that you need to read. By scanning, you save time and you quickly identify which part is important for you. We're going to look at the previous question, question nine. Which word could we easily find in the text? What do you think? Pause and just very quickly think about that now. Okay. What do you think it would be? It would be Lauren. Lauren has a capital letter. It's a name. It's much easier to find. All right. And it's very unlikely to be changed for something else. The only possible situation would be if a name has a famous short version like Robert becomes Bob. But that would be pretty hard. If that happened, we can be sure that we're going to find Lauren very easily. Whereas if it was a word like small, that could have many different meanings. Tiny, reduced, or many, many different things. Okay? The same for people, the same for imagination, But Lauren can't change, so we can quickly find it. So we've done our first scan to find where in the text we should be looking, and now, okay, we found Lauren so we know where we should be looking. We're going to do strategy five, a second scan, and this scan is a little different. We're going to scan for our predicted words. These could either be the exact words that we wrote down or that we thought of, or they could be a synonym words with a similar meaning. So take a look at the paragraph and see if you can see any words that have the same meaning or a very similar meaning, a very close meaning to our list of predicted words which was creative, active, colorful, unconventional, limited, or dull. Read that section of the text below and see if you can match anything or if anything jumps out at you. Have a try now. Okay. Vivid is probably the one that we want to see. You can see it in green down at the right. Her career relies on the vivid images that leap into her mind's eye. Okay, we can also see that it's similar to creative and active. It's the same kind of thing. Maybe not exactly the same meaning, but it's a meaning, that's the idea. But the other words in bold, familiar, and dramatic, Those are adjectives from the grammar side. We could consider them, but they don't fit in the content. They don't describe someone's imagination. Familiar imagination doesn't make sense, doesn't sound right. Dramatic imagination, it's a little closer to being possibly correct. It wouldn't be a terrible guess. But vivid imagination is a fixed expression. That's something that we would often hear about, that's why that is the best choice. Then step six is paraphrasing. We have to pay attention to paraphrasing. Remember, paraphrasing is when we say the same idea, but we use different words, and this is very common in this type of question. Okay, so let's do a little exercise to practice noticing paraphrasing. Which word or group of words in the passage? Can you see that? Has the same meaning as imagination? Okay, so read the passage again, pause the video, try to find how they have paraphrased the idea of imagination. Do that now. Okay. It would be images that leap into her mind's eye. All right? It is a paraphrase, it's a metaphor for imagination. Images is like a picture. Your mind's eye is talking about what's inside your brain. Now, some other ways that we might see paraphrasing happen instead of a metaphor or a simile would be synonyms. The words with the same meaning, opposites, sometimes a little more difficult to notice, but if we think about it carefully, we can spot them. A change in the word form, for example, if you change imagination to imagined or image, or imagine something, okay, so you change the form of the word or a description of the ideas or the concepts. So just using several words to describe the word that's in the question. If it was imagination, they might say the pictures that we see in our heads. Okay. If you are able to practice spotting those synonyms, that's going to really help you to be able to answer these questions confidently and more accurately. Finally, strategy seven is to select carefully. You can see we've done, we've shot the bow and arrow into the bull's eye there. We saw before about the maximum number of words. You have to read the question carefully and know how many words you can use. But that isn't the only reason. We have to be careful when we choose the words from the text. For example, there's a problem in the answer that this student has given. They found the right part of the text, but the answer is wrong. But why? Take a look at that, see if you can figure it out. What's the problem with this? Hypofantasia is its polar opposite to aphantasia. The problem is the word it, it is not grammatical Here, this comes back to the idea of grammar. We check the grammar when we're predicting. And we check the grammar when we're checking when we're re reading our answer. At the end, both conditions, hyperphantasia and aphantasia. Aphantasia are mentioned. We don't need the pronoun. It's absolutely not necessary. It's redundant. So if you gave this answer even though you know you found the right part of the text, even though the real answer is polar opposite, if you've included it, it's going to be wrong. And just imagine how annoying that would be. Try to avoid those grammar mistakes and repeating the same idea, or including things that aren't necessary. Make sure that you check that grammar when you're predicting. But check it again at the end of the test or as you're writing, to make sure that there are no silly mistakes, because it really would be very annoying, That is how we can confidently and accurately take on a gap type of question. Again, if you check in the resource file, you'll be able to find links to those gaped text activities. I suggest that you have a try. Remember what we always say about the timing. If you've got a long time to prepare or you're doing it for interest, be flexible. If you're close to your exam, be strict with yourself about the timing. Remember, you don't have to use every type of technique or skill that we've taught you here. Just use the ones that you think are suitable in that moment. Okay, that's the end of the section all about exams, but the course isn't finished. We've got a bit more reflecting to do. I will see you in the next video. 42. Bringing it together: Welcome back. So, we're reaching the end of this advanced English reading course. So let's do some final reflections. Here are the things that we've covered. So let's have a little think about all of the skills and strategies that we've learned before reading. Now we know how to predict how to skim and scan while we're reading. We can do close reading, we can do inferring, and we can do questioning after reading. We can summarize and synthesize. And we can evaluate and reflect. And we look to all of those exam techniques, comprehension questions, multiple matching, sentence completion, and gaped text. And this is what we're going to do in the next few videos, the final reflection, and also thinking forward. So we've learned a lot of skills, but it's not realistic to use every skill and every strategy every time we read. For example, if you're reading a newspaper article, the skills and the strategies that you used to read that are going to be very different if you're reading like the back of a carton of milk or a text from a friend or things like that. So we need to select which skills to use and adapt them to the situation. So here are some factors to consider when we decide which techniques we're going to employ or use time. How quickly do you need to understand the text? Because some skills are quicker than other skills. Right, The text type, so if it's a menu, it's going to be a different type of skill to maybe a magazine article. The context, are you like on the beach reading, You've got lots of time, you're very relaxed, or are you at work and there's more pressure in a job interview or lying in bed reading. So these can affect the strategies you choose and the priority, how important is it that you understand the text? So let's take a look at some examples. So first I want you to think again about the different skills that we've learned. And you can use the bar on the side of this video, the content bar, just to remind you about the different names if you need reminding. Okay, so I want you to think about two of the strategies that would work when time is limited, it's short time, and two that would take a longer time to use. Okay, pause and choose 2.2 now. Okay, so I would say the quicker options would be things like predicting. You can make a quick prediction and also skimming and scanning. The idea of that is to make it nice and quick. Remember when we had 5 seconds to look at the receipt and find the total price, that's definitely a shorter time. And then some longer ones you could have chosen close reading. That of course, takes some time. Inferring means you're thinking in a deeper way that will take some time. And summarizing. And synthesizing because you need to read the whole thing. If you're synthesizing, need to read other texts and then bring them all together. Now have a think about these different text types I want. You can see there, there's the rabbit and the tortoise, the fast and the slow underneath. Would you read these ones quickly or would you try to read them slowly to understand them fully? Let's see the list. An SMS from your friend, an E mail from a professor, a social media post, an advertisement in a magazine, a love letter, a paragraph from a textbook, a passport application form. So pause and think about, are these ones that you want to just quickly read or do they need more attention and more time to closely understand them? Pause and think about that now. So here's what I would say, an SMS from a friend is a quick one, right? You can see the quick ones are in dark blue and the understand them fully are in green. So the e mail from the, because I'm a teacher and I send e mails, maybe I'm making this more important than it really is, but I think that you should read an e mail from a professor quite carefully. A social media post. It's probably not too important unless it's from last minute English. Then you need to read it very carefully. But all those other people, we can just quickly read it. An advertisement in a magazine? Yeah, you're going to quickly read that one a let. Unless you get lots of love letters. If you get 30 love letters a day from different people, then maybe you need to quickly read it. But most of the time, we're going to read a love letter very carefully. Indeed, a paragraph from a textbook probably need some extra attention and a passport application form. Definitely, you have to read it carefully, indeed. Okay, now sometimes you might not use any strategies at all, and particularly if it's something that's a bit more simple or you can understand the things almost straight away when you first see it, then that's probably enough. And maybe you don't need to use any strategies. But remember, you're in charge. You are the master of your own reading strategies. And you can decide, is this thing very important for me? Should I spend a lot of time on it? Or is this something that I can just glance at? Maybe just skim, and that would be enough. 43. Final Reflection Part 1: Welcome back. So, we're reaching the end of this advanced English reading course. So let's do some final reflections. Here are the things that we've covered. So let's have a little think about all of the skills and strategies that we've learned before reading. Now we know how to predict how to skim and scan while we're reading. We can do close reading, we can do inferring, and we can do questioning after reading. We can summarize and synthesize. And we can evaluate and reflect. And we look to all of those exam techniques, comprehension questions, multiple matching, sentence completion, and gaped text. And this is what we're going to do in the next few videos, the final reflection, and also thinking forward. So we've learned a lot of skills, but it's not realistic to use every skill and every strategy every time we read. For example, if you're reading a newspaper article, the skills and the strategies that you used to read that are going to be very different if you're reading like the back of a carton of milk or a text from a friend or things like that. So we need to select which skills to use and adapt them to the situation. So here are some factors to consider when we decide which techniques we're going to employ or use time. How quickly do you need to understand the text? Because some skills are quicker than other skills. Right, The text type, so if it's a menu, it's going to be a different type of skill to maybe a magazine article. The context, are you like on the beach reading, You've got lots of time, you're very relaxed, or are you at work and there's more pressure in a job interview or lying in bed reading. So these can affect the strategies you choose and the priority, how important is it that you understand the text? So let's take a look at some examples. So first I want you to think again about the different skills that we've learned. And you can use the bar on the side of this video, the content bar, just to remind you about the different names if you need reminding. Okay, so I want you to think about two of the strategies that would work when time is limited, it's short time, and two that would take a longer time to use. Okay, pause and choose 2.2 now. Okay, so I would say the quicker options would be things like predicting. You can make a quick prediction and also skimming and scanning. The idea of that is to make it nice and quick. Remember when we had 5 seconds to look at the receipt and find the total price, that's definitely a shorter time. And then some longer ones you could have chosen close reading. That of course, takes some time. Inferring means you're thinking in a deeper way that will take some time. And summarizing. And synthesizing because you need to read the whole thing. If you're synthesizing, need to read other texts and then bring them all together. Now have a think about these different text types I want. You can see there, there's the rabbit and the tortoise, the fast and the slow underneath. Would you read these ones quickly or would you try to read them slowly to understand them fully? Let's see the list. An SMS from your friend, an E mail from a professor, a social media post, an advertisement in a magazine, a love letter, a paragraph from a textbook, a passport application form. So pause and think about, are these ones that you want to just quickly read or do they need more attention and more time to closely understand them? Pause and think about that now. So here's what I would say, an SMS from a friend is a quick one, right? You can see the quick ones are in dark blue and the understand them fully are in green. So the e mail from the, because I'm a teacher and I send e mails, maybe I'm making this more important than it really is, but I think that you should read an e mail from a professor quite carefully. A social media post. It's probably not too important unless it's from last minute English. Then you need to read it very carefully. But all those other people, we can just quickly read it. An advertisement in a magazine? Yeah, you're going to quickly read that one a let. Unless you get lots of love letters. If you get 30 love letters a day from different people, then maybe you need to quickly read it. But most of the time, we're going to read a love letter very carefully. Indeed, a paragraph from a textbook probably need some extra attention and a passport application form. Definitely, you have to read it carefully, indeed. Okay, now sometimes you might not use any strategies at all, and particularly if it's something that's a bit more simple or you can understand the things almost straight away when you first see it, then that's probably enough. And maybe you don't need to use any strategies. But remember, you're in charge. You are the master of your own reading strategies. And you can decide, is this thing very important for me? Should I spend a lot of time on it? Or is this something that I can just glance at? Maybe just skim, and that would be enough. 44. Final Reflections Part 2: Next, let's talk about the reflection journal. So do you remember when you watched the very first video of this advanced English reading course? And it might seem, it depends, maybe you watched the whole course in one day, so maybe that was today. Or maybe you took like several weeks, or even several months to watch this course. If you took several years, then that might be a bit too long. But anyway, however long you took to watch this course, think back to that first day. So you answered these questions in your journal. So you said between one totally disagree and ten totally agree. How much do you agree with these five things? So now I don't want you to try and remember what your score was. That's not important right now. I want you to think about how you feel now. And I want you to go to the last page of the reflection journal. And I want you to write down your new scores for these. 51 means you totally disagree. Ten means you totally agree. I understand most of what I read in English first time. How much do you agree or disagree? Now, after having watched all of this course, if I don't understand, I know which strategies to use. What score do you give yourself now? I generally feel confident before a reading exam. Again, how would you feel if you had a reading exam tomorrow? It doesn't bother me if I see a word I don't know when I'm reading in English. As long as the general meaning is clear, how do you feel about that? Now finally, I often read in English for pleasure or enjoyment. What's your feeling? So I want you to pause the video and make sure that on the last page of that reflection journal, you write down all of your scores. Do that about your feeling now now. Okay, now that you have written down your scores, I want you to compare your answers from the first and the last day of your course. And I want you to see how much improvement you've made. So this is a time to congratulate yourself. And as we say in English, give yourself a pat on the back and say, well done for choosing to improve an important skill. Okay. Now there may be some areas that you still feel not that confident in. And here are some tips that you can use to keep improving, keep practicing, and using those skills and techniques. When you read English in daily life, practice using the links in the further practice document which is below this video from the resource file. And also celebrate your accomplishments. If you finish reading a novel in English, then celebrate it. Give yourself a reward or post about it on social media and tell your friends about it and accept that progress is gradual and it continues over time. We don't go from like, you know, if you wrote one for one of those things, like I feel confident before an exam, no one totally disagree. I'm sure that now you're not up to ten. If you are, that's fantastic. But that isn't how things work, right? We would hope that you would go from maybe one to maybe up to five, something like that. Progress takes time. The more you practice, the more confident you will feel, the better your skills will be and the better overall your English reading will be. Something else that we did on day one was to record our three challenges. The three challenges that really made us feel like, oh, that's so hard when I'm doing that. Okay. I want you to take a look back at those now. You should have written, this is why I wanted you to write them down. If you didn't write them down, then you've disappointed me. But hopefully, you did write them down because you're a good student, you've got to the end of this course. I'm pretty confident that you wrote down your three challenges, so I want you to look back at them. And I want you to choose an area that feels easier now, but also one that still feels quite hard, okay? And I want you to record both of them in your journal, and here's an example of how you can do it. So number one, the texts contain so much vocabulary, I don't know. That was your challenge at the start of the course and you could write. I now find this easier. I've learned how to use inferring and questioning skills to deduce the meaning of unfamiliar language. I'm also better at prioritizing and know when I can skip a word if it's not very important. But you might also say, I seem to miss hidden messages and meanings. So this is still a bit challenging for me. The predicting and inferring strategies sometimes help, but I still need to work on my evaluating and critical thinking skills, okay? So those are just two examples. Now, I want you to do the same for one of the challenges that's easier for you now and one challenge that's still quite hard. Okay, have a try at that Now. Finally, let's think about a positive reading experience that you've had since you started the course, all right? This could be a big positive experience, like you finished reading the entire series of Charles Dickens and Shakespeare's work. Or it could be very small. You know, probably it will be a bit smaller than such a big example there. It doesn't matter if you feel like an expert yet. We just need something that was a good experience of reading in this time, okay? And think about which strategies you used for that. Think about why they worked well. And think about how you felt. And I want you to record this in your journal as well, like in this example. This is Eva who's 31 from France. She says, my boss asked me to read a report he had received from the team in the Canadian office and present the key information to my colleagues. I used the close reading, summarizing and synthesizing skills, and they really helped me process the facts quickly. In the end, I felt really satisfied with how the meeting went. So that was Eva's positive example. I want you to create your own example with a positive experience of reading that you had. Okay, I'm going to leave you to do that. And I'll be waiting for you with one more video. So I'll see you in that next video. 45. Thinking Forward: Welcome to the last video in our advanced English reading course. So what are we going to do now? So after all of your hard work, you probably want to keep working on your English reading skills. At least I hope that you do, because practice makes perfect. So in the final reflection unit, just before, we looked at some tips to keep improving continuous improvement. And we also looked at the further practice document. What else can you do to carry on progressing? How can you keep improving? How can you improve your confidence and your ability over the next months and years? In this, which is the last unit of this course, we'll look at some different ways to make English reading a permanent part of your routine of your life. Reading for pleasure. Reading for pleasure means when you choose to read, not because your teacher says you have to read this thing, or your boss says you're fired. If you don't read this, it's reading because you enjoy reading and you take pleasure from the process of reading. Okay? It's very different from reading an exam or like doing reading at work, because you choose to do it for enjoyment. And it can help to build your reading skills in many ways. It builds your vocabulary, you learn lots of new words. It improves your cultural knowledge of different places. You develop your knowledge of the world in general. For example, if you read a story about science, you'll learn something about science as well as lots of new words. It helps you to concentrate. The more you read, the more you were able to focus. And that's a super useful skill and something that's more and more difficult. It can reduce stress. It helps you to relax. It can keep your interest in reading because it's like a habit. It's just like going for a walk or going to the gym, or speaking another language. If you leave it for a long time, it's hard to come back because you always feel like, oh, I'll go back and I'm going to be worse than I was. So it's really good to maintain your interest to keep doing it so you keep your skill levels very high. But there is a little bit of a challenge because what should you read? How do you choose the right thing to read? Choosing which book to read can be a challenge. First of all, you should try to choose something that's related to your interest. For instance, for me, when I'm reading in Spanish or in Chinese, I don't choose something that's about, let's say, jewelry or about fashion. That's just not anything I'm interested in. I read things that I am interested in about sports or about nerd, things like fantasy and like Harry Potter and stuff like that. Things that I am interested in. And then because I am interested in them, I already have that interest. Aside from learning another language, it's easier to read. It's more enjoyable. Sometimes you forget that you're actually studying another language, So make it related to your interest. And also avoid books that are too difficult for you. Because if it's way too difficult, you won't enjoy reading it, right? So how can we do that? First, you could choose a book that you've already read in your own language for me, in Spanish, that book was Harry Potter, because I'd already read them many times and I'd seen the movies and everything but in English. And so then when I went to Spanish, I could kind of, you know, I had to learn some words, but I could also kind of guess a lot of the words. And I knew always what was happening in the story. So I was able to still get a lot of enjoyment from it. Next, pick a book on a topic that you're knowledgeable about, something that you already know about. You could consider young adult fiction because that has less complex language. A great choice would be something like the Hunger Games, which are very famous movies, but also the books could be a really good choice. Okay, ask for recommendations from your teachers or your classmates, and you can also use a graded reader. So those are specially written books that are written. Whatever level of English you have. So for example, you might want to read some kind of book. But you think, okay, right now I'm B two level English, and you can find that book in a graded reader at B two level. So that's another great way to make sure that you can read something you like, something interesting, but also that it won't be too difficult. And how can you make the most of reading for pleasure? How can you take the most advantage of it and make it a successful as possible? Let's think about some techniques. I've got some suggestions here, but I've taken out part of the suggestion, and so you have to try to complete it to help you get the idea. Find a quiet space, this will help you. What do you think that could be? That's an easy one, I think. Read a few at a time and this will avoid tiredness vocabulary, which isn't important to the story. What's that word study? Maybe not user English dictionary for words that you don't know and don't remember. You're reading for pleasure. And this isn't an obligation. So I'm not going to, if I tell you that, you'll guess the answer, so you have to guess it by yourself. Pause and try to complete these five now. Okay, let's take a quick look. So this will help you concentrate. Of course, a quiet space means it's not so loud. It's not so distracting. Next, a few chapters. So don't read the whole book. You read maybe two or three chapters, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, something like that. Skip vocabulary, Not study skip vocabulary, which isn't important to the story. If I'm reading Harry Potter, I don't really need to remember the word a cauldron, which is the place where like the thing that they mix their potions in. Because the word cauldron, when will I use that in my life? I just won't use it right. But if there's other vocabulary that is important to the story or that I think is useful for my life, then I'll learn it. Skip vocabulary you don't need or you're not interested in, and just take the things that you interested in or that are useful for you. Monolingual, lingual, that's a hard word to say. Monolingual English dictionary, an English dictionary that doesn't have translations into your language, it's just in English, that's a better way to study. Don't stress, you should relax, enjoy the process. Another important thing to think about is finding time to read. Because we know that life is very busy. There's always some things that seem like they're very important and you have to do them. All of a sudden it's hard to dedicate the time to your English reading practice. What you can do is make a reading schedule, so even if you don't stick to it perfectly, it gives you some organization, some structure. It will remind you of the times in the week when you have the chance to do some English reading. Now, some people use an online calendar, and others use physical diary where you can write things down. Let's take a look at an example to see what we're talking about. On the left, you can see the days Monday through to Sunday. The right is the plan Monday. We're going to read one chapter of the novel. Whatever novel it is. Check a review of a new film in English. Tuesday, not much time today, It's a busy day. Maybe just look at some English posts on Instagram. Wednesday, two chapters of the novel. Thursday, catch up on e mails from Helen. Read some e mails in English, Maybe follow an English recipe. Friday, no free time, very busy. Saturday read at least one news story in English, and Sunday read one chapter of a novel. This, of course, is just an example. I'm not saying that you have to answer e mails from Helen. Maybe you don't know a Helen. I don't know any Helen. But you get the idea that you make a plan. And that way you feel more motivated, you feel more organized, and you increase your chances of actually doing this studying, of actually taking the time to read. Something else you can do is do an independent reading project. This is an activity that you do over time. You can't do a project in one day. This might be a month or maybe three months or six months. It's over a period of time. And it helps you to engage more with the texts that you read and also practice the skills from this course. Some ideas, how can you do a project? You could join an in person or an online book group also called a book club. And this is where several people get together and they all read a book or read some articles in one period of time. And then they share their ideas, they discuss. So that could be a good way to practice your English reading. But also if you discuss it in English, that's English speaking and listening as well. So that could be pretty cool. You can keep a reading journal and record your thoughts after each chapter. You could watch the film version of the book you've read and make some comparisons. You can write down in English the things that you noticed that were different and things that were the same about the book and the film you could write. This is pretty cool, an alternative ending or an additional chapter for the book. So imagine, let's say that you're reading hunger games and you get to the last chapter of the last book and you think, I think this could be a little different. And so you write your own new ending for hunger games. Or you could write a book review. And you could exchange that book review with a classmate, with a friend, with your colleague, if you work with that person. If you make a plan together, you could each write several book reviews for different books and keep it as an ongoing thing. We call that an accountability partner. Someone who make sure that you're reading and you make sure that they're reading. So that's another good way to try to make sure that you keep reading with some sort of project. Finally, let's talk about your future goals. If you turn to the last page of your reflection journal, you've got a page called Thinking Forward, okay? And I want you to write down two or three plans, goals, or ideas that you would like to do now that this course is finished. So for example, you might say, I aim to read Alice in Wonderland before Christmas. I will make a reading schedule at the start of each week, I will ask my friend if he'd like to exchange book reviews in January. Those are just three examples. You can choose whatever you would like, but try to choose at least two or three. Maybe four, but four might be a little bit too many goals. It's good to have fewer goals. Two or three is a pretty good number. That's it. That is the end of our advanced English reading course. I hope that you've found this course useful as if you do have any questions. I'm always very happy to help. Please send me, you can send me a private message or you can ask publicly. In the question and answer section, remember to check out our other courses that we have. You can always use the code of month and year. For example, if you're watching this in September 2024, use the code September 2024. We have all kinds of different courses to help you with all areas of English. Check those out. Thank you very much for taking this course. I really, really hope you enjoyed it, and I'll see you next time.