English comprehension is a critical part of higher secondary examinations and in many competitive examinations too.

There is a sort of gradual toughening of passages as students move to higher classes. From simple and direct passages the difficulty level of passages will increase.

As far as class 11 and above are concerned the brilliance is in answering the multiple-choice questions with a quick grasp of the fundamentals of the given passage within the time limit, say 10 minutes.

See the passage below to get an idea.

“I am a student named Bill. I am 17 years old. I live in London. My father is a businessman. My mother is a doctor. I have one sister and two brothers.”

Here the Question No 1 is How old is Bill?

1. He is 17 years old
2. He is 20 years old
3. Bill is 1 year old.
4. He is 3 years old

This may be a simple passage, but many students find comprehension hard as they feel challenged by vocabulary in terms of words meaning and the passage’s concept.

The expected learning outcomes from English comprehension also include introducing the students to logical inference, sequential analysis, deductive reasoning, techniques of drawing conclusions and enhancing the text’s tonal awareness.

It is a fact that the pace of vocabulary building will vary with each student. Certain methods can help in ut tackling comprehension in a more result-oriented without making the student stressed.

Focus on keywords 

According to an expert, difficult words, phrases and sentences naturally confound students as they cannot understand the meaning at the outset. His advice to students is to focus more on keywords and get rid of the difficulty by framing the gist or summary of the passage by looking beyond verbose words, phrases, sentences.

Experiment the bottom-up approach

To sharpen reading comprehension and achieve speed and write the appropriate answers students have to shun the conservative approach of reading from the top to the bottom.

The expert suggests an alternative approach of reading the questions first to avoid the struggle of making out the passage’s concept and meaning while answering pointed questions.

This helps to keep the focus on keywords while going through the passage for comprehension. The “bottom-up” approach of reading the questions first gives the ease of landing at the core idea, keywords and the broad meaning without time loss than scrambling and digressing on the passage.

Vocabulary is the key asset

There has to be a conscious effort to build a good vocabulary to avoid struggles in reading comprehension. Not knowing the meaning of words make it very difficult to understand the gist of comprehension.

Set a target to learn a certain number of new words every day. For this, there must be an aggressive reading plan. Read English newspapers, stories, textbooks, comics, whatever comes into hand. This helps to seed new words into the subconscious mind.

Practice with complex comprehensions 

In examinations, reading comprehensions can appear from scientific essays, famous fiction passages where the sentences look complex and question a bit daunting too. It is important to practice with passages from science, arts, politics, literature, economics, etc to gain more confidence.

Also, solving papers of previous years will help to stay abreast of the trends of questions and hike preparedness.