10 TOEFL Reading Tips and Strategies to Improve Your Score

Important points to keep in mind:

• Understand the types of questions in the TOEFL Reading section.
• Read regularly university textbooks or other materials that cover a variety of subject areas (e.g., sciences, social sciences, arts, business, etc.) and are written in an academic style. A wide variety of academic texts are available on the Internet as well as in magazines and journals.
• Practice scanning the passage quickly to get a general impression of the main idea rather than reading each word and each sentence.
• After scanning the passage, read it again carefully and note the main idea of the passage along with the important facts.
• Go through all the four options of the answers carefully. Even if you find the first option suitable, make sure to read all the remaining options as well. These questions are tricky, so make sure to read all the options and then select the best one.
• Practice continuously to increase reading rate, fluency and speed.
• Choose some unfamiliar words in the passage and guess the meaning from the context (surrounding sentences). Then, look them up to determine their meaning.
• Underline all pronouns (e.g., he, him, they, them, etc.) and identify the nouns to which they refer in the passage.
• Practice making inferences and drawing conclusions based on what is implied in the passage as a whole.
• Identify the passage type (e.g., classification, cause/effect, compare/contrast, problem/solution, description, narration, etc.) and its organization.
• Create an outline of the passage to distinguish between major and minor points.
• Create an oral or written summary of the passage using the charts and outlines.
• Paraphrase individual sentences in a passage. Then, paraphrase entire paragraphs.
• Keep an eye on your speed. Try to spend around 20 minutes on a passage, so you can spend a little more than one minute on every question and also have some time, in the end, to go back revise your answers.

Note: According to ETS, TOEFL’s Reading section can best be prepared by improving your vocabulary. You can refine your English-language reading skills by reading different kinds of materials available to read like newspapers, magazines, books and online.

You can also check out:

• Best Books and Resources for TOEFL
• Important Tips for TOEFL
• TOEFL Practice Test
• TOEFL Preparation Tips