Does Extensive Reading Help with IELTS, TOEFL and TOEIC?

The IELTS Academic Reading test gives you 60 minutes for three sections and 40 questions. According to the official IELTS page, the three texts add up to 2,150 to 2,750 words. The TOEIC Listening & Reading Test has a 75-minute reading section with 100 questions, and Part 7 alone, the reading of single and multiple documents, accounts for 54 of them (IIBC, the TOEIC office in Japan). TOEFL iBT has a reading section too.

All of these tests ask you to read a lot of English in a limited time. As a test date gets closer, many learners wonder whether the time they spend on books should go to practice tests instead. This post looks at what research has found about extensive reading, then at which parts of a test it helps with and where it falls short.

What the research shows

Nakanishi’s meta-analysis (TESOL Quarterly, 2015) brought together 34 studies with 3,942 participants in total. It found a medium effect (d = 0.46) of extensive reading on reading proficiency compared with learners who did not read extensively. In studies comparing the same learners before and after, the effect was larger (d = 0.71).

For reading speed, a study by Beglar, Hunt and Kite (Language Learning, 2012) is useful. It followed 97 first-year university students in Japan for a year and compared an intensive reading class with three groups doing pleasure reading. Every pleasure reading group gained more reading speed than the intensive reading group, and the groups that read the most gained the most. For most learners, reading one book every two weeks or more worked best. Comprehension stayed high as speed went up. The study also found that reading simplified books led to bigger speed gains than reading unsimplified ones.

None of these numbers measure test scores directly. Still, I think it is fair to say that extensive reading clearly builds reading ability and reading speed.

Which parts of a test it helps with

I think the biggest benefit is being able to finish long texts within the time. IELTS asks you to get through up to 2,750 words in an hour, and in TOEIC more than half of the reading questions are in Part 7. Reading fast enough to follow the meaning without translating sentence by sentence is hard to build from practice tests alone.

Next comes vocabulary. In extensive reading you meet words in sentences, again and again. When a word from your word list turns up in a book, you learn it a second time, along with how it is used. I wrote about vocabulary and reading in How Many English Words Do You Need to Read a Novel?.

Grammar benefits to some degree too, I think. Reading a lot makes correct forms familiar, so in a gap-fill question you start to feel “I have never seen it written like that.” I don’t believe extensive reading alone teaches fine grammatical distinctions, though.

The effect on listening is indirect. Understanding English in its own word order helps when you listen as well. But it does not replace practice in hearing the sounds.

What extensive reading leaves out

The test format. Question types, timing and answer sheets only become familiar by doing the test’s own questions. In TOEIC, the format is the same every time, so getting used to it pays off.

Writing and speaking. IELTS and TOEFL both test writing and speaking. Reading more gives you more expressions to use, but you still need to practise writing and speaking yourself.

The kind of vocabulary. The words you meet in stories are quite different from the academic vocabulary of IELTS and TOEFL, or the workplace vocabulary of TOEIC. You can read many 19th-century novels without meeting much of the language of lectures, invoices or meeting notices.

Precision. In extensive reading you skip what you don’t understand and keep going. That is its strength, but in a test, a single word can change the answer.

How to split your time before a test

From here on, this is my opinion.

If the test is several months away, I would make extensive reading the main activity and do format practice once or twice a week. Reading speed does not grow quickly, and the study above measured its growth over a whole year.

From about a month before the test, spend more time on practice questions. Even then, I would not drop reading entirely, and would keep up at least fifteen minutes a day. The texts in practice books tend to be short and cut into pieces, and it is easy to lose the feel of reading a long stretch.

In the last few days, I would check the format rather than start a new book. Preparing for a score and reading to become a reader are not a choice between two things. You shift the weight between them depending on how close the test is.

Reading with ABC George

I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad that holds the Project Gutenberg catalogue of more than 61,000 English books. The Start here shelf on the Discover screen has 30 short, easy classics chosen for learners. Books are downloaded to your device, so you can read on a train without a connection.

While reading, long-press a word and tap Look up to see a plain-English definition and the WordNet senses. The words you look up are saved with the sentence you met them in, and come back later as fill-in-the-blank and spelling quizzes. The word book also includes the NGSL and NAWL word lists. NAWL is a list of words common in academic texts.

Since ABC George’s books are Project Gutenberg classics, they contain little of the workplace English found in TOEIC or the academic English of IELTS and TOEFL. Practise the test format with official materials. For the Cambridge exams, I also make AlphaGeorge, an app for exam preparation.

When to move from graded readers to original books is in When to Move from Graded Readers to Original Books, and how to do extensive reading is in How to Do Extensive Reading in English.