Help - English Test Next Week

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l_bexley

Help - English Test Next Week

Post by l_bexley »

Bexley English test is next week. Son does well at maths, VR and NVR, but does really badly on English papers. He's a good reader and reasonable speller. The problem is he just doesn't seem to be able to find the answer to questions in the body of the text.

He hasn't had a tutor and I didn't know if there were any specific tips to help him improve. I could look through a last couple of papers with him at the weekend and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Bexley Mum 2

English next week

Post by Bexley Mum 2 »

I'm working on the assumption that there isn't much I could do in the way of practice over the next few days that would influence his performance in the test. You may have picked up from earlier messages that my son is very nervous so, at this stage, I'm concentrating on keeping him calm rather than doing more practice. Having said that, I am planning to do a few bits of NVR and a little bit of English on Sunday afternoon (he's doing things the rest of the weekend so it's the only time we've got). For English, rather than do a test paper, I thought I would just talk to him about technique and check his knowledge of terminology. So, on the comprehension I will remind him that the answers are always in the text and that the questions work through the text in order - ie he's not going to find the answer to the last question at the beginning or in the middle of the text. I'm also going to check that he remembers the meaning of noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun etc - hopefully he does! I think my son finds the "spot the missing punctuation" harder - mainly because he doesn't read the whole sentence in his head so he's not thinking about where pauses might be. So I might do a couple of those with him and remind him of the sort of things he's looking for - missing full stops, missing commas, comma before speech marks, capital letter after speech marks etc etc. I thought we might have a quick look through the sentences in the 4 NFER English papers and pick out a few at random. But, apart from that, I don't think there's much else we can do! I wish him the very best of luck.
l_bexley

Post by l_bexley »

Thanks for this. I have almost the opposite problem - son is too laid back if anything. Still that's probably a good thing as I'm stressed enough for two!

Good luck for next week.
traceyanne2

Post by traceyanne2 »

We're going to attempt 1 paper of each over the weekend and hope thats enough. Just think they are almost half way through. Should be almost finished with nv by now.I talked to head this morning you'd think it almost criminal to write on question paper she doesn't think anyone has ever done it before.
l_bexley

Post by l_bexley »

When elder son was taking the tests four years ago, I had always taught him to put a line through any obviously wrong answers (especially NVR) and make other notes on the test paper to help. I was shocked that they were then told on the day not to mark the test paper - son didn't seem bothered though and went on to pass.

Has anyone been given a valid reason for not marking the test paper?

Surely Bexley can afford to print out a new set of test papers every year!
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