6 Steps to Score in PSLE Chinese Language Comprehension!

---

Step 1: Reading the Passage.
You need to determine the actor/character of the story, the time/venue and What happened. (Most PSLE Chinese comprehension passage is narrative in nature so this is not hard.)
Next you need to figure out the theme sentence in every paragraph and map out the main theme of the passage whether it is honesty, courage or others.
Lastly you need to recap the story line in your mind so that you have a hint to look for when you are answering the questions.
NOTE: you can try to think of the passage like it’s a Youtube video show! or a manga animate! where the actors do lots of actions to tell you the moral of the story.

Step 2: Annotate as you Read. …
Annotating involves highlighting or underlining key pieces of text and making notes in the margins of the text. (Note you can ignore making notes part as most questions are not Higher order thinking questions.)
Note keywords are important to answering of questions.
Turning of events are important as some question require you to show the similarity or differences in such events.

Step 3: Read the Questions and Highlight. …
When you read the questions, highlight the 5w1h words (examples such as Who, Where, When, What, How) and the keywords in the questions.
Locate the keywords in passage and process to look out for the answer.
Highlight the answer short phrases.

Step 4: Read the Passage a SECOND Time. …
As some questions hand out answer across several paragraphs, you do not want to left your answers incomplete so you need to revisit the story line and make sure the answer given is comprehensive.

Step 5: Answer the Questions. …
When you answer the questions, you need to do 2 things first:-
1) adjust the use of pronouns so that it is consistent to the question. So you do not mix the use of pronouns, or using the pronoun with no actor/character identified in the question.
2) when you quote words, do change it to active voice.

Then answer by rephrasing the answer in complete sentences.
(Lower levels may copy part of questions to answer them like in this example:
谁吃了那些饼干？
弟弟 吃了那些饼干。
Notice the bold words are exactly the same!)

Step 6: Check for completeness of answer in regards to sentence completeness and meaning.

H.O.T. (Higher order thinking) questions belong to the evaluate and application of knowledge. These questions helps to determine one has attained a level of comprehension that is above normal students.
If you want to score then you need to be HOT!
I’ll leave it to next article to give tips on skills to answer such questions.

Other things to note when you answer comprehension questions:
1) Provide necessary elaboration / explanation / examples in paragraph to get the second/third/full marks
2) Use the looping method while looking for contextual clues. Words and phrases which have been embedded in the text (by the author) may help to explain a difficult word. They are evident in the words or phrases that come before or after the sentences.