Reading: Core English skills part 1

PTE Author
PTE Author
Image - Woman reading- 800px
Reading time: 5 minutes

In PTE Academic Part 2: Reading, you will be required to read a text in each question to understand what it means in order to answer the question.

To identify and develop your reading skills we’ve put together some information to help you.

Grammar

Grammar skills are important as they help you understand what you are reading. In Part 2: Reading you need to understand the meaning of the tense system, how articles work and how to use pronouns.

Tense

The tense system refers to the way in which you write about situations in the past, present or future. It’s important to be able to understand how time is expressed in reading texts in order to understand the meaning of the text.

To learn more about the tense system view the Anglo-Link’s video on tenses.

Articles

In the reading section, you will also need to understand how articles work in English. Articles are words such as ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘an’.

Knowing how articles work will help you to understand the topic sentence in a paragraph and that will help locate an answer in a reading passage. This will help you with the Re-order Paragraphs question types in the test.

Indefinite articles (a or an) usually come before the definite article (the) before the same noun.

For example, An eminent scientist worked for years trying to find a new species of exotic bird. She led a team of three field researchers. One of the team members found the bird in a tropical forest. Two years later the same team found another new species in the forest.

You can learn how to use the correctly in this Oxford Online English video.

Pronouns

It’s important to also know what pronouns are to better understand the text you are reading. Pronouns are used to replace nouns so we do not have to keep repeating the same noun.

Knowing how to use pronouns will help in the test, particularly in the Re-order Paragraph questions, as they help you identify the correct position of sentences within a paragraph.

For example, Dr Gomez felt he needed to spend more time with his students when they were new to his faculty. There was so much information that he wanted to give them that he needed to spend more than a whole day with them, which surprised even himself.

To learn more and practice using pronouns, visit Ginger Software’s pronoun page.

Vocabulary

Having a wide vocabulary will help you succeed in the PTE Academic test as you will not need to slow down for as many words that you do not understand.

To widen your vocabulary you should:

  • Choose reading texts across a wide range of topics. Tip: Do not choose difficult texts.

  • Try to read the text and find words you do not understand, then try to work out the meaning from the context first. If you are still not sure, look the words up in a

     

Word families

When it comes to learning vocabulary, make sure to learn the word family of a word.

For example, progress (noun/verb), progressive (adjective), progression (noun). To learn the words, use it ten times, in different ways, such as writing, speaking and reading within a short time.

In PTE Academic you will need to know and demonstrate how to read a word, pronounce it correctly and how to spell it. You will also need to know if it is an academic or informal word and how to use it in a sentence.

Learn more about three aspects of academic vocabulary in the Griffith University’s Learn English- Academic Vocabulary video.

Context

Another important skill to improve vocabulary is inferring unknown vocabulary from context. You should be able to guess the meaning of new words or phrases based on the words around it (the context).

For example, you can guess the meaning of profligate from this sentence: The young man who spent all his money on expensive cars and holidays was so profligate that he wasted his whole fortune.

Sometimes you will be unable to work out the meaning of a word from the context and will need to look it up in a dictionary.

Collocations

Lastly, you will need to understand collocations. Collocations are words that often go together. You will need to have a good understanding of collocations in order to answer the Reading: Fill in the Blanks and Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks questions.

The more you read and listen to English, the more collocations you will learn. The PTE Academic Collocation List will also help you to learn these.

You’ll also need to learn reading methods and styles of writing in order to do well in this part of the test. Read some helpful tips on how to improve these skills.

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    Writing: core English skills part 1
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    Reading time: 4 minutes

    Part 1 of PTE Academic includes a variety of speaking and writing question types. For writing questions, you may need to improve your skills, such as grammar, spelling, and vocabulary.

    To help practice these skills, we’ve put together some tips on how to improve for this part of the test.

    Grammar

    To help improve grammar, get into the habit of reading something in English every day.

    Create a reading plan and a reading goal to improve your grammar. Start by reading for at least 30 minutes a day.

    It’s recommended that you read a range of texts that you find interesting. Also read news articles on English news sites such as:

    It is hard to use correct grammar in long sentences, so try to keep sentences short: about 18 to 30 words. You should also practice with a variety of short and long sentences.

    Always remember to:

    • End sentences with a full stop (period)

    • Use uppercase and lowercase correctly

    Try to avoid run-on sentences. These are sentences which should be cut to make a shorter sentence, or properly joined to make a grammatically correct sentence.

    You can avoid run-on sentences by using compound and complex sentences, which will also help improve your score. Use commas when writing complex sentences. Some examples of the compound and complex sentences can be found through the British Council’s Learn English website.

    To perform well, learn to proofread your writing so that you can complete the question types as correctly as possible.

    If you can identify areas that you often get wrong, you should work on improving these areas. Ask your English teacher for help, or if you don’t have an English teacher, you can look up your common errors on the internet.

    Spelling

    PTE Academic recognizes and accepts US, UK, Australian and Canadian spelling. However, you should be careful with your spelling. Once you have chosen a spelling convention for one question, keep using it within that question. You can change the spelling format in answers to other questions if you like.

    Vocabulary

    To do well in the writing test, you need to have a broad vocabulary. You should have a good dictionary to help you. A good dictionary will have the meaning, related forms of the word, and example sentences.

    Longman Dictionaries are a great resource to help you improve your vocabulary.

    You should expose yourself to new words at least ten times a day to expand your vocabulary. To learn a new word you should read it, write it and listen to it many times over a couple of days so you can understand the word and use the correct pronunciation.

    Another way to expand your vocabulary is to learn the word forms of words you already know.

    For example, climate (noun), acclimatization (noun), climatic (adjective), acclimatize (verb) etc.

    Each of the above word forms mean something slightly different, so try to learn all the meanings of each word.

    In PTE Academic you will score higher points for vocabulary if by using academic words in your writing. Try to learn some of the most frequent academic words used in writing.

    Also, think about using synonyms in your writing to avoid repetition of words. A thesaurus can help you find synonyms for common academic words.

    The other elements of your vocabulary to consider are correct common prefixes and suffixes, which are added to the base words. Prefixes can change the meaning of a word, for example, expensive and inexpensive.

    Adding a suffix, however, can change the part of speech of the word. A common suffix used is ly, which can change an adjective into an adverb (quick/quickly), ment can change a verb into a noun (entertain/entertainment).

    There are also collocations, which help you use the right word combinations, as some English words just don’t work well together. To identify collocations, read the PTE Academic collocation list.

    PTE Academic is not very strict about accepting only academic vocabulary. You will not lose points for the use of personal pronouns. You will, however, score more points by using higher-level academic vocabulary in the correct way.

    You should try to keep a notebook of new words you learn, their meanings, synonyms, and all the parts of vocabulary that may help you in the test.

    The last core skill required for the writing test is written discourse.

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    Your accent will not stand in the way of success!

    Everyone has an accent. You might even be a proficient or fluent English speaker, but with an accent, other people find hard to understand.

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    When the automated scoring program was being designed the computer was trained using candidates from over 126 countries, speaking more than 90 different languages, so it recognizes accents from around the globe. As a result, PTE Academic’s automated scoring technology recognizes and marks everyone’s speech equally and with equal accuracy, regardless of where they are from. What the PTE Academic scoring engine looks for is intelligibility and clarity of response (not which accent you are speaking in) – did you answer in a clear and understandable way that any international speaker of English would understand?

    To hear more on this, listen as one of our leading independent advisors, Dr Alistair Van Moere, a member of Pearson’s Technical Advisory Group, explains how it works.

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    The best universities in the UK for international students
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    In this article for international students in the UK, we cover: 

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    The UK education system: A quick overview