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The Occupational English Test, or OET, is a language test made just for healthcare professionals. It evaluates whether you have the English skills necessary to work or study in English-speaking healthcare environments. The test focuses on real-life situations that you might encounter in your career and includes four parts—Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking.

Here, we will focus on the OET Reading sub-test, its format, and how it is evaluated. This part assesses how well you can read and understand healthcare-related texts, such as articles or guidelines, which are important for daily tasks like patient care and decision-making.

OET Reading

The OET reading sub-test is divided into three parts and consists of 42 questions. It takes 60 minutes to complete and includes topics of general healthcare interest that are accessible to candidates across all medical professions.

Structure of the OET Reading Sub-Test

• Part A (Expeditious Reading Task- 15 minutes): This section involves reading four short texts related to a single healthcare topic. You need to answer 20 questions, including matching, sentence completion and short-answer questions.
• Part B (Short Workplace Extracts): In this part, you read six short texts, such as policy documents, hospital guidelines, or emails and answer one multiple-choice question for each text.
• Part C (Longer Articles): This section includes two longer texts, like professional development articles, with eight multiple-choice questions for each article. The timing for Parts B and C is combined and takes 45 minutes to complete.

How Is the OET Reading Sub-Test Evaluated?

This sub-test evaluates various skills, such as skimming and scanning, identifying details, understanding the main idea and interpreting explicit or implied meanings. Additionally, it assesses your ability to recognise the attitude or opinion expressed in the texts.

Answers for Part A are marked manually by qualified assessors using a marking guide, while answers for Parts B and C are scanned and scored automatically by a computer.

We hope this guide has been helpful for you. If you are preparing for OET to pursue your dream of working or studying in an English-speaking country, StudyOET offers expertly crafted courses to make your preparation seamless. Contact us today to learn more about our OET preparatory courses.

Authored By: Sarath