Dhugal TP 6

I met up with Abdullah last night at Starbucks to have a tutoring session. He is taking the ACT this Saturday, so we decided on going through some practice tests online together. Note to self: do not believe everything your tutee tells you. I'm not implying Abdullah malevolently tried to deceive me, but he seriously overestimated his reading comprehension skills. Before we started, I asked him what areas he struggled with, and he told me mathematics, and that the reading was easy for him. This was not the case as I soon discovered.

We began with a sample Reading comprehension test, which consisted of a passage and questions. I did the test with him, and knowing that speed and efficiency are key in these sorts of tests, I timed us. He finished 3 minutes after I did. We then went over the answers. I got them all right, and he scored a 2/10. Not gonna pass the ACT like that. I wondered how he could do so badly after telling me he had an easy time with these things. Maybe he rushed to keep up with me. Maybe he was exhausted (it was Sunday night). But as we went throught the answers one by one, it became apparent that Abdullah lacked the strategy to answer comprehensive questions; if he could not find the answer word for word in the text, he guessed. Furthermore, he didn't read the whole passage.

With this in mind, we did another Reading comprehension test. This time, I told him to tell me when he finished reading the entire passage, so that we could go through the questions one by one, together. This of course took much longer. We read through each question carefully, and I showed him how to approach the questions, by asking himself:

-What is the question asking me to do? (Infer, predict, define...)
-Is the question directing me to a specific location in the passage?
-What are the key words in this question? (character, location, date)  

Good readers will do these things subconsciously, and will have no trouble with these texts. But Abdullah, with his limited vocab and poor strategy, struggles mightily. Slowing the process down and making him think hard about each question, and in turn having him verbalize his though process did help a lot (he got a 5/10 on this one, despite the language being harder).