attempting reading compreshension

. Attempting Reading Comprehension Questions Introduction Reading is a receptive skill i.e. we receive message when we read a text. We read to grasp the meaning. So, reading means comprehending a text to calculate the meaning of it. How we read depends on the purpose. Reading a newspaper for example is far more different than reading an essay or a poem of a course book. In the latter case, we try to find out the message in the texts. In our present secondary level English curriculum, reading occupies the largest part i.e. 40 percent. The curriculum includes a large variety of reading texts like: poems, stories, essays, biographies, letters, notices, advertisements etc. The curriculum aims to develop the skills to comprehend a variety of texts on the part of the students. In the SLC examination too, varieties of texts are given to test the reading comprehension skill of the students. The following box gives the details on the test items regarding the reading part. Total Marks: 40 Total Questions: Four reading comprehension passages Seen passages: 2 (5 +10 =15 marks) Unseen passages: 2 (10 + 15 =25 marks) Types of test items: - Short answer questions - Cloze - Ordering - Multiple Choice - True/False - Fill in the spaces - Vocabulary (synonyms and antonyms) - Matching (Except short answer questions, the types of questions should not be repeated in the two seen comprehension passages. This is applied to the two unseen comprehension passages as well.) Types of reading texts: Seen passages: 1 poem and 1 general text from Grade X textbook. Unseen passages: passages, advertisements, stories, notices, letters, charts, graphs and tables
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The following lines may provide the guidelines on how to attempt the reading comprehension questions which in turn is expected to help the students to perform better in the examination. Students for securing better marks not only need to write correct answers to the questions but also they need to write the answers with correct layout and design. It has been found out that the students, despite writing the correct answers, have not got marks as much as they deserve. There are various factors affecting the marking like: layout design, organization of the answers, handwriting etc. This section is trying to give some tips for the students so that they will get better marks in the SLC examination. These tips are equally important to the teachers as well. The teachers need to instruct their students accordingly. Some of the mistakes that the students make regarding layout and design of the answers in the SLC examination, found during re-totaling procedure and other research activities, are listed below: 1. Writing answers inside the cover page. The cover page is torn during coding and thus the answers on that page are left unmarked. 2. Misinterpreting „Rewrite‟ the instruction. Some of the students have been found to have written the question first as it is in the question and again writing the answers. e.g. I saw ……….. ewe yesterday. (a /an /the) Ans: I saw a ewe yesterday. The examiners and head examiners sometimes may miss the answers; they just see the questions and think that the students have forgotten to write the answers and the examinees become victimized. 3. Writing the answers of different questions with no blank lines in between them. 4. Writing news stories, stories and essays without headings. 5. Writing, most probably copying, the unnecessary lines particularly in short-answer questions of reading comprehension passage. 6. Rewriting the text of question number nine i.e. grammar type 2 with the correct alternative but underlining it. Thus, it takes longer time for the examiners and head examiners to find the answers and sometimes they miss scoring which leaves the students victimized.
7. Some students are found to have done the matching exercise by drawing lines and not
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writing the words with their meanings in the same line. Better Ways to Write the Answers in SLC Better ways to write the answers accurately and with good layout according to the types of questions are exemplified below. Students will be benefitted if they follow these tips and teachers are required to deliver them to their students: 1. Writing similar words/opposite words from the text: For these types of questions students are required to write the words from the test paper as they are given and writing the correct words from the text next to them with a hyphen before the word. While writing the words from the text the words must match in terms of word class i.e. noun to noun, verb to verb etc. Some clues in the question may help in finding the answers from the text, for example, the words ending in '-ly' or '-ing', '-ness', past forms of the verbs have the similar or opposite words with the same features. Each answer is to be written in separate lines to maintain neatness. e. g. (a) sharp - blunt (b) empty - full etc. 2. Writing answers to short-answer questions: While writing short answers to the comprehension questions, students are not required to write the questions however it is mandatory to write the number clearly. The important thing to be kept in mind in this type of question is writing „just the answer‟ i.e. avoiding unnecessary details as shown in the example below. While attempting short answer questions, students should first identify the key word(s) in the question and look for the word or its similar word/phrase in the text grasp the meaning and write the answer in their own words. e. g. (c) What is the deadline for application submission? The last date of application submission is 25th April, 2011. (Instead of writing this, majority of the students are found to copy the unnecessary lines from the vacancy as: „Interested candidates are requested to send their application along with CV and photo to the following address by 25th April 2011‟ which can‟t be considered as the correct answer and thus doesn't deserve the marks)
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