Part 1 Reading: Reading Correspondence (11 minutes)

Overview: Reading Correspondence

In Part 1, you will read a personal correspondence (the first task), like an email, and then you will be asked to answer 6 questions. The topic of the email will be ‘typical’: talk of a holiday, a wedding, a dinner engagement, etc. These are ‘gist’ questions. They are testing your ability to understand the meanings and the content of an email, for example.  The second task is a Response to the email (for example) and will directly respond to task one. There will be 5 blanks to fill in from 5 corresponding drop-down menus – choose one response for your answer. Therefore, there are 11 questions to answer in Part of the CELPIP Reading exam.

Skills needed:

Skimming is a quick read for general ideas. You look for a general understanding of the text and try to place it in its correct genre. Is it a letter? Is it a newspaper article? Is it a chapter book? You do not have to read every word in the text. You look at the title, the subtitle, pictures, or graphics for clues as to what the text is about. Obviously, the CELPIP Exam will use a form of correspondence between two people; typically, it will be an email or a letter. So, on the exam, you will skim the text to find out to whom the letter or email is written and who wrote the letter. You might notice the number of paragraphs and check to see if the letter or email is formal or informal in nature. The email that follows is informal because its introduction uses ‘Hi’ and the sign-off uses ‘Love’. If it was a formal letter, it would use Dear Mr. or Mrs. _____ and sign-off would use ‘Yours faithfully’ or ‘Yours sincerely’ (slightly less formal).

Scanning is also quick reading, but the key difference that distinguishes it from Skimming is that the reader is looking for ‘particular information’. On the CELPIP exam, you will always be looking for ‘particular information’ in Reading Correspondence (Part 1). You will be looking for a number, a name, a time, a place, or a date, etc., so you will scan the text to find a correct answer.

When you Scan, (1) you must decide what information you are looking for (2) then decide where you would look for such information, (3) you move your eyes quickly down the page until you find what you are looking for (4) then read to get the information. When you find what you are looking for you usually stop reading.

On the CELPIP exam, you will follow the same procedure as above for each question in part 1 or the message/email part of the reading. The second part, the response, relies on ‘thorough comprehension’ of the original message/email so that you can fill in the blanks accurately.

Thorough Comprehension:

When you read for Thorough Comprehension, you try to understand the total meaning of the reading. You want to know the details as well as the general meaning of each section of a text.

If you have thoroughly comprehended a text, you have done the following:

• Understood the main ideas and the author’s point of view
• Understood the relationships of ideas in the text, including how they relate to the author’s purpose
• Note that some ideas and points of view that were not mentioned were, however, implied by the author (drawing inferences)

4. Understand the concepts in the passage as well as the vocabulary. This may require you to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from ‘context’.

Making Inferences or guessing the meaning of a word from the ‘context’ it is found in: All reading is inferential. Sometimes, making inferences is called ‘reading between the lines’. This means you use the information in the text to make educated guesses about other things in the text. Sometimes you have to guess about what the writer has not put in the text. Other times, you may need to guess about the meaning when you do not know all the words. Good readers, generally, make inferences all the time as they read.

For the CELPIP Reading Part 1, test-takers will not have to make ‘difficult’ inferences about what the writer has not written, as there will always be information available to find the correct answer.