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Do the keyword dance: How to use (and not use) keywords to answer multiple choice comprehension questions

PLEASE READ THIS – YOUR CHILD’S 11 PLUS SUCCESS MAY DEPEND ON IT.

Forgive the capitals and the warning, but I’m writing this immediately after a teaching session, in which my very capable student learned a hack and then did something unexpected that your child must not do!

To set the context, I’m including the entire hack here, so you can teach your child and understand the Keyword Dance fully. You’ll hopefully see this is a very practical step that your child can actually do on their own, once you have looked at it together. This is Happy Hack 12 from the instantly downloadable book, Grammar School Success in Multiple Choice English – 59 Easy Ways to Score High in your 11 Plus English Exam. It’s also on kindle at amazon,

as well as being part of a summer learning deal at less than half price.

At the end of the hack, we’ll discuss the unexpected thing my student did. To be clear,

keywords are important words in the question

that tell you exactly what the question wants to look for. Once you have identified these (I show you how in the book, in a separate hack), you have something to look for. Okay, here’s your hack…

Happy Hack 12:

Back and forwards, back and forwards

Do the Keyword Dance!

No, not the keyboard dance, the keyword dance. Get off your computer now, silly.

After you’ve read and spotted and underlined keywords in the question and the writing, do the Keyword Dance as you attack each question.  Here’s how:

1. Find the question keyword or phrase in the passage.

2. Read the whole sentence the word is in.

3. Read a sentence or two before it (Back).

4. Read a sentence or two after it (Forwards).   

Doing this is sometimes enough to find the information you need to answer correctly.   

Say you want to answer the question:

Q. How do the people near the tiger feel?

a) Terrified.

b) Confused.

c) Happy.

d) Really tired because they’ve been running away from it all day.

Your gut, common sense brain might think terrified is the most appropriate answer – it’s a tiger after all. But wait, do the keyword dance.

You look for the word ‘tiger’. You find it. Great, but it doesn’t tell you enough yet. Read before and after to find out about the special world this word lives in.

Is the tiger in a zoo? In the wild? About to eat its lunch? Shopping in Asda? Only a pretend tiger, really it’s your teacher dressed up for charity? This will make a huge difference to your answer. 

What happens if the Keyword Dance doesn’t work?

Relax.  

Maybe the keyword is in more than one place. You’d expect to find the word ‘tiger’ a few times in an article about tigers, wouldn’t you? Maybe the first place you find it is telling you what tigers eat. Not what you are looking for.

Just look for the keyword somewhere else, along with other keywords in the question. In the question above, we could be looking for the word ‘near’ as well, or a phrase like it, e.g. close to.

TIP: Quite often, we need two keywords to be together to find the right answer.

This is one way the answers try to trick you, by giving you one keyword and hoping it will turn you into a Rushie.

No, thank you.

Each time you find the keyword or words, do the dance – before the word, after the word, then the sentence before, the sentence after, occasionally two sentences before and after. 

It’s only one hack of many, yet it’s one of the most helpful in finding the info you need to answer the question.  

…Okay, welcome back to the blog post. You can see that keywords are amazingly helpful. In the lesson I was giving this morning, we were rehearsing a couple of hacks, one of which was the Keyword Dance. The question asked why the bay was good for fishing boats. The paragraph that we were asked to look at had lots of info about types of fish, types of boats, types of fishermen, as well as info on the weather and time of day. My student explored the paragraph twice, but was adamant that he couldn’t find the answer.

Why? This is what he did – he didn’t look even once for the keyword: bay. He was confused by all the info, felt there was too much, became sidetracked with the similarity of fishing boats with fisherman and fish, and was thrown off course by the weather info.

I asked him to go back to the question. What was the one word that was most important – what did the question actually want him to know? He looked again: “Aaah, BAY!” he yelled. Immediately, he found that word, which only appeared once in the paragraph, did the keyword dance and found the answer – the bay was sheltered.

So simple, if you actually use the hack. If you actually look for the keywords. Otherwise, you’ve wasted seconds underlining keywords that can’t help you even though they want to because you don’t use them.

Two large, lovely lessons from today that absolutely work as a team:

  • Teach your child the Keyword Dance. Practise it in your practice papers.
  • Children – USE IT. Actually look for the words that matter. You are not trying to answer a random question – the questions are very specific. Find the keywords in the question you are answering and find them again in the text. The answer will be there, promise!

Was this blog post helpful? You can sign up to the blog for free to keep yourself informed of more tips. There are lots more (58 more, as you will have worked out from the title of the book!) happy hacks waiting to help your child reach their highest mark in Grammar School Success in Multiple Choice English – 59 Easy Ways to Score High in your 11 Plus English Exam. You can buy it alone, or as part of the crazy summer learning deal, which gives you all four books in the series for better than half-price.

Thank you for investing your time in these words and thank you for nurturing your child’s Great Eleven Plus Moment!

Stay happy, Lee

How can you help your 11 plus child in the summer holidays? Try this 15hr weekly plan.

(Part 4 of a 4-blog mini-series.)

Actually, it looks as if it will be a five-blog mini-series; there’s a lot of info to help you. All to the good. The last time we spoke, we looked generally at morning and afternoon patterns of learning. What follows is a zoomed-in look at a day from an effective weekly routine.

Week 1: Monday

  1. 9.30 a.m. – English multiple choice test – 50 mins.
  2. A small 10-break, then mark the test. You can mark it together, asking your child to look at the supplied answers and check against their paper. Ask them to play at being the examiner, not getting upset at wrong answers, but rather being curious to know.
  3. Identify the learning areas your child got right. For example, did they score highest in spelling, punctuation, grammar or comprehension sections? Note this and see if the same thing happens on the next test.
  4. Identify the learning areas your child missed marks on. Note this and see if there is a pattern on the next test. Did they score lowest in comprehension, or did they not see the tricks being played in the punctuation questions? Be very upbeat about discovering these areas. You are both playing detective to find out what the next area is that they are going to be brilliant at.
  5. Suppose comprehension was low-scored. Looking at the reading text AND the questions, can you work out together why it was tricky? For example, it could have been a misunderstanding of vocabulary. Were there a lot of words your child didn’t know? How did this affect the score? Was it just choosing the wrong meaning from a list, or did the misunderstanding lead to a misreading of the meaning of the text, perhaps the motivation for a character’s actions. Or was it the questions themselves that were misread? Was it even something to do with the tricky way the answers are laid out like traps? I found so many tricks in both the questions and the answers of most multiple choice English tests that I wrote a very helpful book explaining them all, along with explanations of what your child can actually do to beat those tricks and boost their scores.
  6. To finish the English session, pick up on an area of weakness immediately and learn something together. Suppose there are often lots of words your child doesn’t know (indeed, even if they do know lots of words), then start a daily habit of learning 5-10 new words a day. You could do this in a million different ways. Take the letters in their name and find words in a dictionary or thesaurus beginning with each letter; find five words that start with the same letter; choose one word and its meaning, followed by a word that starts with the last letter of the previous word; focus on verbs only, or adverbs, or nouns, etc; find five words that use the same prefix, e.g. indecipherable, inhumane, innocuous; five words that end with the same suffix, e.g. courageous, advantageous, epigeous. You can make a game of it, using a dice to find a word to land on. Alternatively, if punctuation is an issue, have a twenty minute learning session on how to use a particular mark, e.g. semi-colon. Once it is half-understood, put it into practice and have your child write sentences using the punctuation mark, or have them deliberately fool you by leaving out the problem punctuation mark, which you have to spot.

If you’ve spent 2hrs on a session, not including breaks, then that might be enough for a day’s targeted learning. Let your child continue with their day, BUT HANG ON…Remember to include other good learning habits, such as daily reading later in the day, shared loud reading to each other, listening to audiobooks or programmes that use formal language such as nature documentaries, leaving background programmes on that use formal language, such as Radio 4 documentaries, and avoiding over use (or any use) of electronic games that might zap their mind and undo the good work you’ve just done. You are trying to lead your child into the zone, into a summer holiday mindset of learning and thinking, with minimal drag from activities that don’t support learning.

If you haven’t used 2 hours, or fancy targeting 3-hours, then you could have an hour away before repeating the process for Maths, or verbal/non-verbal if your choice of school tests using these. By week 3, it would be very helpful to make time for different subjects in the same day, to build stamina and to give the brain experience of switching between subjects, which they have to do during their real test.

Okay, perhaps we’ve covered enough for now. Hmm…and we’re only at Monday. This is turning into less of a mini-series and more of a season box set! It all matters and all has to be covered. Make sure you read the previous blogs to help you catch up with where we’ve got to.

Thank you for nurturing your child. Start learning, stay learning and stay 11plushappy!