ANALYSIS OF READING TASKS WITHIN THE INTERNATIONAL EXAMS (IELTS, TOEFL, CAE) AND STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ SKILLS AND ABILITIES

The article offers the higher education teachers’ work experience description in accordance with educational strategy for teaching English to students of higher education institutions. To start with, 3 types of international exams - TOEFL, IELTS, CAE are considered and dissembled, then their similarities and differences are discussed. As the description of every kind of exam might take too much time and space, the principal contents of the article is limited to the Reading section. The article is targeted at analyzing different Reading types, Reading tests in various testing systems, accepted by universities and business in the English-speaking world and widely used to test Reading abilities of HSE students.To start with, the article depicts principal types of reading and specifies 3 reading aspects, which are mostly used in the testing systems: reading for specific information or scanning, reading for gist or skimming, and reading for detail. The authors disclose the essence of each reading type, reveal its features and manifest the importance of each of the established reading type for testing exam. By considering Reading Section tasks the authors take into consideration the following criteria: duration, number of tasks, types of tasks, length of text passages and make some conclusions about the reasonability of the proposed tasks.After monitoring the Reading section tasks the authors also show the results of HSE students, who are likely to have passed the English exam successfully enough, but in many cases the reason of the success is the advice given to participants of the examination procedure. The teachers describe strategies, subdivided into general advice connected with any exam, reading part tips and hints that help overcome specific difficulties of certain types of tests and questions.

کلیدواژه ها:

reading ، strategies ، international exams ، testing ، assessment