In this post we will provide you with General TIPs and Strategies To Prepare For APTIS Reading Test.

How does the Aptis Reading test work?

The test is separated into four parts. Each part becomes harder, so that part 1 is the easiest, while part 4 is the hardest. There are three types of test and the time limit for each type is below:

·       Aptis General - 35 minutes

·       Aptis Advanced - 60 minutes

·       Aptis for Teens and Aptis for Teachers - 30 minutes

Part 1: Sentence comprehension

Part one of the test is a short text. This can be either an email or a note. The task is to choose a word, from three options given, and complete a sentence. There are five sentences and although it is a complete text, you do not have to understand all of the text. The purpose of this part is to assess how well you can understand short sentences. You should read all of the text and all of the answers before you decide which word to choose.

Part 2: Text cohesion

In this part of the test, you have to put six jumbled sentences into the correct order to make a completed text. The text will not be correct unless the sentences are in the right order. Sentence number one is done for you. In this part of the test there are two separate texts.

Part 3: Opinion matching

In part 3 there are four short texts of about 100 words. Each text is different but they all share the same theme. Each text will describe what someone likes or thinks. After the texts, there are seven statements. The task is to match the statement to the correct person.

Part 4: Long text comprehension

Part four if the Aptis test is a long text of around 750 words. This tests your ability to understand the main ideas in long texts. The text is separated into eight paragraphs and you have eight headings. The first question will already be done and the task is to match the paragraph with a heading. Each heading will sum up what is in a paragraph and so there can only be one correct answer.

Top Tips For The Reading Test

There are some things that you can do in order to improve your APTIS reading score. Improving your reading will raise the level of your English in general.

·       Analyse context: For example, the word ‘arduous’ does not appear in texts very often but look at this sentence.

The children were extremely tired but relieved after their arduous journey.

Arduous comes before ‘journey’, and so it is probably an adjective. The journey made the children tired, and so ‘arduous’ must describe a journey that is tiring. They were ‘relieved’ when it had finished. Therefore, ‘arduous’ must mean tiring and difficult and must be a negative word. 

·       Be Aware Of Timing: Don’t spend too long on one part. Learn to ‘pace yourself’ by practising the test at home using a timer. Learn the reading skills demonstrated and don’t spend large amounts of time trying to understand the complete text.

·       Flag the question for later review if not sure: Remember you can always go back to a question and often something will become clearer if you stop concentrating on it for a moment.

·       Don't leave any blank answers: Check the summary page to see if you have missed any questions. You do not lose marks for incorrect questions and so make sure that you answer everything.

·       Go back to flagged questions (if you have time): If you have moved on to another question, don’t forget to go back and complete the ones you left. If you still don’t know the answer, guess and move on.

·       Don’t expect to understand every word: Many of my students have been taught to look up every word they don’t understand in a dictionary. The theory behind this is good, a wide vocabulary is vital to getting a good score in the APTIS test, but worrying about words you don’t understand in the reading exam is one of the worst things you can do. It will slow you down and unknown words rarely prevent you from getting the answer right.

·       Don’t panic: Some of the questions have to be easy and some have to be extremely difficult so that they assess students from low to high levels. The key is not to panic when trying to answer a difficult one. Nearly all of the APTIS teachers I know have to check the answers to some questions because they are so difficult.

·       Start practice tests slowly: Many teachers advise students to practice for the APTIS reading test ‘under exam conditions’. This means you do the practise test in one hour without any help, just like in the exam. This is poor advice for students who have just started preparing for the test. By doing the test under exam conditions you put too much pressure on yourself. You don’t give yourself time to reflect on how to answer specific question types, spot patterns in questions and how you answer them, note down common vocabulary and notice how much time you spend answering certain questions. It also does not give you a chance to analyse your mistakes. Once you have practised several tests slowly, you can then practice them under exams conditions.

·       Skimming and scanning: You should be able to skim and scan passages to do well in APTIS. Skimming is reading a text quickly to get a general idea. To look at the topics of each paragraph and decide briefly what the paragraph is about. Scanning is looking for specific information. When you have read the questions you may find that there is a name or number in the text that will lead you to the answer. You would then skim the text looking for that word before reading the information around it in detail.

·       Getting used to difficult passages on a range of topics: Although most English tests do not require specific knowledge of a subject and will not you technical words, some passages can seem difficult. You can make sure that this becomes less of a problem by reading in English more and by reading texts similar in length and style to the ones you would find in the test. Doing this will help your writing as well.

·       Keywords: Each question will have keywords to help you locate the information in the passage and find the right answer. Sometime they may be obvious like a date. You would then scan the text looking for the date. Often they are in the form of a synonym or similar phrase(sometimes called a ‘parallel phrase’). It might be- ‘Which person dislikes busy places? And there is a phrase ‘John can’t stand crowds’. Therefore, the answer would be John.

·       Grammar: Questions types such as sentence completion require that sentence is grammatically correct when you have put your answer in the right tense and/or have the correct noun + verb agreement. In multiple-choice questions, if the grammar is not right, the answer is wrong. In writing, you will lose marks for basic grammar errors and so it is important to check your work after you have finished.

·       Develop your speed reading skills: The test has a strict time limit which will challenge your ability. Remember that you are not reading a book or newspaper but just looking for information. Exam reading is different from reading in detail because you are only trying to answer some questions. Learn how to Skim and Scan texts and not to worry about unknown words. 

·       Develop skills for each type of question in reading: There are three types of questions in APTIS reading test and you need to find a strategy to tackle each one.

·       Leave difficult questions for the end. If you spend a lot of time on questions that you find difficult, you’ll be wasting valuable exam time. You won’t be able to answer all the easier questions and you’ll lose points! If you don’t know the right answers to some questions, leave them and move on. This way, you can focus on all the questions you do know the answers to. You can return to the difficult questions at the end if you have the time.

·       Practice with interesting texts: In APTIS reading tips you will often be told to practise reading as much as possible, but what do you read? You should of course practice with real reading tests and some difficult readings, but this can get quite boring. Any kind of reading will help, so find some English fiction (stories) books you like and read them. Short articles in magazines or on the internet are useful particularly if you look for ones that are the same length as the exam. If you enjoy it, you are much more likely to read more. Make sure that you choose the right level to read. If it is too easy, that you learn nothing. If it is too hard, then you will soon get bored. Find something that will still mean you have to check and learn new words but if it is a story you enjoy, you are much more likely to pick it up and read more. This will improve your vocabulary, reading speed, and other reading skills.

·       Focus: Your focus should be on the text first, then on the questions! Only if you have a good understanding of the text, can you answer the questions precisely and more effectively.

·       Similar phrases: Develop the skill to spot similar phrases. There are different ways of expressing the same thing, such as, “I like to ski” and “skiing is enjoyable”. Many questions, for example, YES/NO/NOT GIVEN questions and gap fills, test your ability to match up a parallel phrase in the task with its equivalent in the text.

·       Be able to Categorize: APTIS exam writers select a range of specific type of texts. You need to learn to recognize the type of text you are reading. It will help you predict its structure and you will be able to understand it more quickly. There are four types of APTIS S Reading texts – A) analytic texts that will discuss the reasons why something happened or make recommendations or explain a concept B) descriptive texts that describe a situation, explain how something is done or categorize something C) discursive texts in which different opinions are expressed about an issue and D) narrative texts that explain a chronological sequence of events.

·       Unfamiliar vocabulary? That's OK! Do not worry if the word seems unfamiliar to you or you don’t know some words. Every answer can be found in the text, you don’t need any additional knowledge to succeed.

·       Pay attention to the details: Look thoroughly through the text and answers. Any special features such as capital letters, underlining, italics, figures, graphs and tables are likely to matter.

·       Cross out the wrong answers: If you see an answer that you're sure is wrong, cross it out. This way you won't get confused and save your time.

·       Don’t start reading the text before looking at the tasks. When you start reading, you should do so with questions in mind. If not, you’ll read the text too often and you simply don’t have time for that. Read the tasks and questions first, before you read the text. Underline the keywords and think about the information you need to find to answer those questions while you’re reading. Skim the text for a minute to get a general idea and then scan for information.

·       Know your weaknesses: Unless you know your weaknesses, you won’t know how to improve. The biggest weakness for many is that they try to read a text in English in a different way than they would in their language. They feel that they have to read the English text very carefully and slowly.

·       Do not rely on translation. You are more likely to remember a word if you learn it in context and with English having so many words that mean different things, you are not so likely to get the wrong meaning.

·       Keep a vocabulary notebook but not only with translations but with words that collocate, or go together and with opposites or antonyms (this will make it easier to remember the word, and you double your vocabulary at the same time).

·       Remember to revise the things you have learned regularly. So that something stays in your memory, you have to review it, or you will forget. Long periods of study are not suitable for remembering English, but regular periods are. Three 20 minute revision periods are better than one one-hour session.

·       The joy of reading: it is important that you enjoy your reading experience. Reading for pleasure not only makes you want to read more, it also improves your reading skills.

·       Re-telling the story: It is a good idea to paraphrase what you have read. You can do this by writing down the main ideas of a chapter in a story, or an article you have found interesting. Summarising what you have read, using your own words, helps to build your vocabulary, which is very important for your APTIS test.

·       Notice the title of the passage. It often gives you a general idea about the main idea of the text, as will the sub-headings.

·       Guess the meaning from the context: When a native speaker in any language finds a word they don’t understand, they rarely translate. Usually, they get a general idea from the contest. Firstly, you can ask yourself, do I need to understand this word to answer the question? the answer is usually no, in which case you can ignore it. If the answer is yes, then decide if the word is positive or negative? Finally, look at the context.

Example: He was put in prison for robbery but later exonerated.

The word ‘exonerated’ is quite a specialised word in English and not used much and we don’t know if it is positive or negative. We know someone was put in prison and then we have the word ‘but’ this tells us there was a change to the situation. We can guess that ‘exonerated’ means something like freed or cleared, which it does.

·       Read some parts of the text in detail – you won't have time to read the whole text in detail, but at times you will need to do this. When you are answering questions and you identify where the answer is in the text, you may need to read in detail to make sure you can work out the correct answer.

·       Read, read, read! Reading will increase your vocabulary and help make the more idiomatic expressions and phrases, like dependent prepositions and phrasal verbs, become more instinctive as well as improving your English grammar.

·       Read something suitable for your level: When you read, make sure that you read something suitable for your level. Too difficult and you will never finish, too easy and it will be boring. You can get graded readers, most of them have a glossary at the back, and these will help you learn quicker. Also, and this seems obvious, read things that you are interested in!

·       APTIS practice reading tests: Practice makes perfect! So practice APTIS reading test as many times you can. If you would like to increase your APTIS reading score by practicing more reading tests then please check the exam library in our website here. There you will find largest simulated APTIS test database. Totally free with no registration (we won't even ask for your email).