Comprehension Answering Techniques

Dear Parents,

You would receive your child's Term 1 Progress Report Card soon and you would notice that he did not do well for his comprehension. All the boys are very weak in this area and they need to use the next few months to brush up on their answering techniques so that they would not lose marks unnecessarily for their final year exam.

I spent 3 hours drilling the boys on comprehension answering techniques today as I am getting increasingly worried by the boys' inability to comprehend the questions. And parents, it's time for you to spend some time studying too. Your child spent 3 laborious hours today perfecting his answering techniques, and now it's parents' turn! :)

Alright, jokes aside, the following techniques are very useful and I need parents to know this as well so that you can help your child in his revision.

Comprehension Open-Ended (These are the steps which your child is required to carry out when answering every single question)

1. Read the question and identify the key words. For example: What do some people like about pizzas?
2. In the question mentioned above, the key words are "What" and "people like about pizzas"
3. "What" requires you to give a description. The question requires you to give a description about pizzas that make people like them.
4. "What" questions usually require you to give descriptive information which can be found easily in the text.
5. After identifying the key words and understanding what the question requires you to do, you go back to the passage and search for these key words. So, following the example above, we would be looking for words such as "pizza", "like", etc.
6. Say for example, we found these key words in the following paragraph "Pizza is yummy! A lot of people like to eat it! Some people like the cheese. Some people like the sauce. What do you like the most?"
7. Based on the paragraph identified above, we would have found all our key words. The key words "some people like" are especially important in helping us to identify our answers. Through this identification of key words, we would have found the link to our answers: "cheese" and "sauce".
8. Now, we need to form a complete and proper English sentence to answer this question. This requires a second technique called "SPG".
9. S: Spelling; P: Punctuation; G: Grammar
10. After every answer that they have written, they are required to check their spelling (S) - check if every word is spelt correctly. Then, check punctuation - check if full-stops are written, quotation marks are used appropriately, etc. Lastly, check grammar (G) - check if you have answered in the correct tense. For example, if question is phrased in the past tense, you must answer in past tense.
11. This whole process is repeated for every single question. They will have to do this until they fully understand how to use this technique (before you allow them to provide you with answers). If they have used this technique religiously, you would see lots of underlining and lots of highlighter marks.
12. They have also learnt in summary, the requirements of certain key words: Who, What, Where, Why and How.
13. Who - asks for people; What - asks for a description of information; Where - asks for location; Why - asks for explanation & How - asks for a description of steps

I hope this would be useful to you! Happy studying!

Please feel free to approach me for help if this appears confusing to you (I understand that it is rather wordy)

Regards,

Miss Joyce Tan