Strategies to improve your Read and Complete, Read and Select

This article shares some ways to help you improve your performance on Read and Complete, and Read and Select question types. Besides, it also shares tips to advance your reading generally.      

I. What do you need to know?          

1. Read and Complete         

• Requirement: You will fill in the blanks of unfinished words in a passage
• Timer: 03 minutes
• Sub-scores: Literacy, Comprehension
• Appearance times: 3-6

2. Read and Select           

• Requirement: You will read and choose whether a word is real or not
• Timer: 05 seconds for each word, it automatically moves on after 05 seconds
• Sub-scores: Literacy, Comprehension
• Appearance times: 15-18

Why do we put these two question types in this article? They both contribute to Literacy and Comprehension sub-scores, which require you to improve the same skills.     

Let's go to see how you could improve your performance! 

II. How to enhance your performance?        

Obviously, these two question types test your Reading and Writing skill. Therefore, you should always pay close attention to improving your above skills simultaneously in order to aim for higher scores.     

So we share with you several ways to enhance your Reading and Writing.    

1. Read, read, and read        

Reading is the most critical skill when it comes to Read and Complete, and Read and Select because these question types test your vocabulary bank.     

Hence, one of the best ways to improve your score for Literacy and Comprehension is to read on a daily basis. Moreover, you should read and widen your vocabulary bank from a wide range of subjects, including Business, Education, Tourism, Economy, Politics, Food, Medical, Animals, Music, and so on.     

After so many times our team has taken DETs, we can tell for certain that their subjects are diverse. Thus, the best way to prepare for these question types is to read a wide range of subjects.     

Some websites we suggest below:  

• NPR
• Medium
• Forbes

A screenshot from NPR:

These four websites probably cover all topics you need. If you find other amazing websites to improve your reading, please share them with our community!    

2. Review your words       

The purposes of reading are enormous. We read to advance our Comprehension and Literacy. We read to improve our writing. And most importantly, we read to remember new words.     

We use the word “remember” because it is enough to apply to Read and Complete, and Read and Select question types instead of speaking it, which requires more effort.     

In other words, you should read and note down new words, phrasal verbs, collocations, idioms, etc. So later, you can review them easier.     

We strongly recommend you do this is to looking them up in English-English dictionaries and taking screenshots.    

We suggest these two digital dictionaries:  

• Oxford Learner's Dictionaries
• Cambridge Dictionary

And why should you take a screenshot?  You can learn other new words that you can use with it, and it’s more effective for you to go over again through its meaning and examples.     

For example:         

You also can note them down in your notebooks and study later, but it’s quite time-consuming if you write down words and their synonyms.     

3. Practice pronunciation      

One of the ways to remember a new word longer is to pronounce it properly, and you should do it more often in order to completely understand and use it appropriately in your writing and speaking.    

Once you are able to remind yourself of words you have studied, you will definitely enhance your performance for Read and Complete, and Read and Select.    

But this time, you need to pronounce the word and make a sentence.     

For example, “ominous” is new to me, so I will practice pronouncing it and making sentences with it.     

III. Tips to boost your score      

1. Tips for each question type       

a. Read and Complete      

To begin with, stay calm if you see a long passage. DO NOT panic. Most of the time, people go panic if they see long passages because they tend to believe they cannot complete all blanks on time. You cannot change it, so you should better be calm, take a deep breath and start reading.    

Secondly, you do not want to fill in blanks right away after the question appears because you may miss out on some essential points you haven’t read yet. We already experienced lengthy passages, and we didn’t know what to fill in at first until we read through the whole one because some advanced words may appear at the end of the passage. Hence, you would better read the entire passage, as it gives you a better understanding. 

For example, the word "matches" appears near the end of the passage, which helps us fill in the second blank.

Next step, we find tense triggers and word triggers.

Tense triggers are some clues to show you what tense they use in the passage, so you can use the correct ones.         

In the above example, you see that we use IS, ARE, and RUNS. Thus, we know that we should use the Simple Tense in this passage to fill in the blanks of verb forms.

Word triggers indicate what word forms should we fill in the blank. To illustrate, the below example shows "most r e v_ _ _ _ around". The word "most" in this case is an adverb, therefore "r e v_ _ _ _ around" is a phrasal verb, which means "r e v_ _ _ _" is a verb that we need to fill in.

Another example as below, we have " s u p p _ _ _ _ relectance". "Reluctance" is obviously a noun, so the blank " s u p p _ _ _ _ " is definitely an adjective. 

Special note: You should fill in the blanks even you are not confident about your answers because you will receive the same score for a blank or an incorrect response.       

b. Read and Select      

You see everything crystal clear on the screen. What you need to do is to choose words that you think are real. When choosing real words, your vocabulary bank matters; otherwise, you end up guessing based on your speculation.     

However, we do have one particular tip to offer. It’s called Nearby words. Mostly, every word has some nearby words, which is why we learn one, and we are able to remember others. In other words, if you see some nearby words with the one you already know, let’s say 60 to 70%, then go for it.     

For example:     

Special note: If you choose an unreal word, you will be penalized more than missing a real word. So, please be careful with your choice.      

2. Review your answers      

Whatever you do, it’s always crucial to go over all words again after filling in or picking them.  It’s a significant step to minimize your mistakes to achieve a better score.    

As a result, you should fully exploit the 03 minutes you have for Read and Complete, 01 minute for Read and Select, and spend a little of them reviewing your answers.    

3. What shouldn’t you do?       

a. Read and Complete      

From the Official Guide for test takers shared by Duolingo English Test, you should only use US English to fill in the blanks, NOT UK English. So, DO NOT use UK English in this question type. In another way, you will definitely lose your points.     

b. Read and Select       

It depends on the situation. If you are 70% sure, then go for it. Contrastingly, if you are not so sure about the words, you should not choose them because they may end up wrong and lose your points.    

*Practice makes perfect!          

Thousands of questions, instant feedback, an integrated dictionary, and much more are waiting for you.    

You can experience thousands of questions in our practice platform to test yourself. Our correcting systems assess your skills based on the same grading aspects that the Duolingo English Test uses to assess your skills, including Fluency, Coherence, Lexis, Grammar, Content, and Acoustic features (Pronunciation), and report detailed feedback to help you improve your score efficiently.      

Watch this sample feedback from our automatically correcting systems.

Go to our DET Practice Platform to register an account and experience all question types with our correcting systems FOR FREE, an integrated dictionary, and so on.