Verbal Reasoning

[DarkEnergy]

Just a quick check, to make sure I don't make a wrong assumption.

I am assuming Warwickshire Durham CEM has no Verbal Reasoning such as is posted on the verbal reasoning section in this forum. So can I safely ignore verbal reasoning? What Durham CEM call verbal reasoning, everyone else calls english comprehension.

I have some verbal reasoning papers and will probably do a bit anyway, but not make a big deal of it. 4 NFER papers as practice and then leave it.

Any comments welcome.

[Ed's mum]

I can only speak for my daughter.

She genuinely has told me no specifics about the test at all and I haven't tried to find out. It was a really intense experience but was over in the matter of a few hours. Due to the intensity - the sheer amount of questions - I think it would be difficult for many children to remember what came up in the test; especially those children who weren't particularly tutored. Which brings me to the point I really wanted to make...

My finding, only my opinion, was that no specific tutoring was required - just as sound a grounding in maths and literacy as possible. Read, read and read some more.

[KenR]

So can I safely ignore verbal reasoning? What Durham CEM call verbal reasoning, everyone else calls english comprehension.

Not really, Durham CEM have Coze tests, Synonyms and Antonyms - see examples on the B/Ham site

[Bad Dad]

When my son sat the test, he said that in addition to comprehension and cloze, there were some verbal reasoning questions, but only vocabularly based ones. He was a bit hazy on detail for the VR, but he said there were no codes style questions e.g. where you have to translate numbers into letters or identify which letters come next in a sequence. With my second son I have done some practice using Bond VR, but I cross out the codes questions. I am not sure how much help it is as I agree with Ed's Mum that there is no substitute for plenty of reading, but unfortunately my second son is not a big reader!

[um]

there are unlikely to be code type questions but are likely to be antonyms and synonyms questions.

free rice offers useful practice on this and there is also a vocab cd rom that i bought on this website.

no caps got baby!

[DarkEnergy]

cheers friends, so no real need to do lots of vr. but lots of reading, synonyms, antonyms and cloze questions. in other words i would call that english practice.

thanks for the help... i worry sometimes i am doing it wrong. i guess i just need reasssuring sometimes.

sorry no capitals, got cup of tea.

[Rugbymum]

Yes, I would agree with the others.

I would also say that you do need to be aware that we need to expect the unexpected so I am planning to do a few VR papers just to familiarise my DD.

[DarkEnergy]

My current plan for teaching DD is as follows

40% comprehension - mainly Bond how to do comprehension
40% maths - lots of varieties including Bond and NFER
10% NVR - NFER and Bond how to
10% Traditional VR - simply as I have the NFER past papers already.

Also picking up quite a lot of level 5 and 6 maths and english SATs.

So VR is relegated to the Championship in Warwickshire.

[um]

sorry no capitals, got cup of tea.[/quote]

very funny, but tea doesn't cry when you put it down!

[fm]

I don't know specifically about the Warwickshire exam but I would say you may be devoting more time to comprehension than is really warranted. Certainly in the Birmingham exam it makes up less than 25% of the English component--in fact, about 8% of the total mark. You must then factor in how much improvement in comprehension you can bring in the space of the 7 months left

At any rate, I would consider devoting more time to vocabulary and reading.