CHALLENGES OF TEACHING IELTS READING TO UKRAINIAN ADULT LEARNERS

Abstract

This chapter analyses the author’s experience in teaching Reading part of International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and the challenges that Ukrainian teachers and adult students face when working with this part of the exam. The popularity of IELTS makes it an object of research of many scholars. Ukrainian context has not been studied yet, however the number of test takers in Ukraine is increasing. The research material of the article includes case studies of students’ performance during IELTS Reading module and hands-on experience of the author based on 18 years of teaching and 5 years of preparing students to take IELTS exam (15 adult learners in total). During these years students practiced doing 30 reading tests, each test containing 40 tasks (1200 tasks in total). Ukrainian adult learners who are our target audience, are people of 25 years and older. The main challenge they face when preparing for IELTS test, in our opinion, is that different approach to learning a language as compared to the experience they had at school or even at university. For many people over 30, especially those, whose university major was not connected with languages, spend longer time to adjust to IELTS books and resources, since the materials they had used during their studies were often based on the Soviet tradition. The main challenges that IELTS takers face when dealing with Reading module of the exam are as follows: 1)different approach to reading; 2) time restrictions; 3) specific types of tasks (answering True/False/Not Given questions,Gapfill exercises).