Remember that time – perhaps quite a long time ago – when you were staring so hard into some piece of foreign language? In that moment, though the phonetics felt so weird on your tongue, something clicked: in your head, you finally found the link between that mumbo-jumbo and its English equivalent all by yourself. Following this, there may have been a burst of elation as you finally stepped one-step closer to where you are today in your language-learning journey.

As you enter your mock or final exams, I would like you to recall this memory or some equivalent. You have spent so much time, so much worry so much confusion, striving to attain your current fluency so please do not doubt your abilities. Now, I cannot guarantee you will do “just fine” (cuz i don’t wanna get sued soz), but I do know you can do your best if you follow these simple strategies.

The reading exam

Just some quick facts 📠:

	Japanese B SL	Japanese B HL
Duration	1 hour 45 mins + 5 mins reading	2 hours + 5 mins reading
Total marks	40	40
Texts:	問題A, B and C	問題A, B and C

Key to success

Everyone has their own way to success, but heres the 5 things that worked for me:

1. Pace yourself
2. The text first or the question first?
3. Optimising time
4. Looking for clues
5. Practice! Practice! Practice!!

1. Pace yourself

It’s important – as with any exam – to understand how much time you have. The full exam for both SL and HL students is 1 hour with 5 minutes of reading time. Below is an IDEAL breakdown of your time. A similar structure may be useful for HL students.

AMOUNT OF TIME	ACTIVITY
5 minutes (perusal)	Read through ALL your questions (at least for text A)
Equal amount of time	Read text A + annotations + Answer text A
Equal amount of time	Read text B + annotations + Answer text B
Equal amount of time	Read text C + annotations + Answer text C
5-10 minutes	Go through starred questions + editing

Now, you may be thinking, ‘errmmm but shouldn’t text B and C take longer than text A?’. Well, realistically, yes. However, when you are practising it would be better to think about the ‘time it takes’ as dependent on your ‘reading speed’ rather than ‘text difficulty’. Changing to this mentality forces you to consider all three texts as the ‘same difficulty’ and as a result you are more likely to spend less time than you think you need. Remember, TIME is MARKS in paper 2.

2. The text first or the question first?

Ah… the age-old question: to read the text or to read the questions… that is the question. Personally, I feel like this is up to individual preference.

Question first, Text second

Considering you cannot make any annotations during reading time, using the five minutes perusal to read through as many of the questions as possibly can ensures you know what to look out for when you read the text.

Text first, Question second

Alternatively, since you know the first method involves reading the questions twice, you may choose to read the text first. Either way, you will need to go between the question booklet and the text booklet.

3. Optimising time

There are a few ways you can optimise time in your reading exam, the most obvious being increasing your reading speed. This requires quite a bit of effort on your part before your exams but has a high pay-off especially if you can comprehend pretty decently too. I would recommend extensive reading (if possible with audio at native speed) and reading aloud. There are many free and school resources for extensive reading, so please ask your teachers early-on!

Next is note-taking. Any key words (i.e. from the questions that you read earlier, or dates, place, names or anything that SEEMS important) please UNDERLINE, HIGHLIGHT, DO SOMETHING. When you answer questions it will be waaaay easier to come back to and you are more likely to remember the context surrounding those sections.

Additionally, during your practice sessions, it would be good to take note of unfamiliar words and grammar patterns so that you can come back to these in your regular study.

4. Looking for clues

This section goes hand-in-hand with the previous section. Even for HL students, there are going to be things that you do not understand. And that is OK, so long as you know how to deal with it. Below are some tips if you come across things you don’t understand.

1. Read around
2. Check the full context

This goes without saying, but reading around the entire sentence and RE-READing can sometimes be extremely beneficial especially if you misread something to begin with. Mouthing the words can also help to limit skipping words in your head. Next, checking the entire context is also beneficial. Check the title. Check the image. Check the reference. Anything that gives you information that isn’t from the text itself may be more useful than being further discombobulated by the text itself.

5. Practice! Practice! Practice!!

Although practicing reading papers will not magically improve your fluency in the language, it will help you remember which question styles are associated with each text (A, B and C) and help you come up with your own strategies for answering them. Due to this, I would recommended using past papers carefully during your earlier study and completing most (if not all) available past papers for your mock and finals study.

Older reading papers, although having different formatting, are still useable. I would recommend using these throughout your IB course so that you can save the newer past papers for your finals.

頑張ってください～!!