星期日, 三月 05, 2017

Steps To PSLE Chinese, So what after CA1? Exam Analysis in a simple page

Last Year, Most Primary schools have changed their test format to something nearer to 2017 new Chinese Format, so CA1 is a gauge to the students ability to adapt to the new format quickly. Yes, last year's Primary 5 papers are not totally the new format so essentially your child is just taken the 2017 PSLE paper 2 for the first time.

Now Take your child's CA1 paper and break them into section A and B. Then fill up the remarks with your child.

Sect A OAS                       Marks Scored         Remarks (What Mistake made and how to correct?)

Item 1 yu wen yin yong       ______/30              __________________________________________

                                                                         __________________________________________

Item 2 duan wen tian kong  ______/10              __________________________________________

                                                                         __________________________________________

Item 3 yue du li jie 1           ______/10              __________________________________________

                                                                         __________________________________________


Total Section A                  ______/50             __________________________________________

                                                                        __________________________________________


Section B
Item 4 wan cheng dui hua   ______/8              __________________________________________

                                                                        __________________________________________

Item 5 yue du li jie 2          ______/32              __________________________________________

                                                                        __________________________________________

Total Section B                 ______/40             __________________________________________

                                                                        __________________________________________

Total marks                      ______/90             __________________________________________

                                                                        __________________________________________


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And here are some common mistakes to take note in Section A!

1) Lack of knowledge of the words to be tested, either one is studying without understanding or one is not done much studying at all.

2) Cannot recognize the words either in the questions or the passages.

3) Lack of skills to extract answers from the passage via keywords in the questions and adapt the answers according to the question.

Common ways to score in Section A!

1) school spelling lists has been painstakingly compiled by teachers to help students score in section A but most students just ignore the spelling lists when they prepare their exams, this is a mistake. Most spelling lists has common word pairs like this one. And furthermore some spelling lists have a huge list of common useful phrases that are very helpful in compositions and oral.


Just by studying those spelling lists and memorizing them daily would benefit your child greatly.

2) Get your child to listen to the chapters in MOE's textbook reading website daily. its called
XUELE. Take a chapter every day and make sure your child listened N times till they can read out the text loud. You should start with the first chapter in primary 6 textbook and go all the way to the last and restart again. then go to the first chapter in primary 5 textbook till the last chapter. Then cycle back to primary 6 textbook chapter 1. Do it every day and your child will quickly know all the words required of him to read. This method is obviously not for the lazy and the inconsistent ones.

3) Alternatively read a sentence everyday from a composition book everyday. And no its not a joke, if your child can do that for 3 months at least, you will see results.

4) Take my Book and study the word list (on the first pages of every exercise) careful especially the part on meaning (意思), word pairs (搭配)  and sentences (句子).

Its available in popular and other bookstores.

Common ways to score in Section B
1) Do read the questions carefully and highlight/underline the keywords, then using the keywords, go to the passage and find them out  (sometimes the questions do not paraphrase the passage sentence directly so your child have to understand the meaning well enough to find the sentences with similar meaning.) and highlight the answer. The final stage is the adaptation of the answers to answer the questions directly. most of the time your child has to correct use the pronouns “我”, 作者,你 correctly. Sometimes your child have to merge the sentences together with connecting nouns like 所以,因此,而且.

2) For the few Higher order thinking questions,  your child need to be learn three skills:-
(A) story telling skills. When questions asked about relevant personal experiences your child need to write a short account of the desired moral value. a short story with an introduction, a development and an ending would be enough. The point is the story must be relevant to the question.
(B) story extraction.Sometimes the questions does asked your child to refer to certain parts of the passage to illustrate certain values and your child should be able to quickly identify the relevant parts of the passage shifty..
(C) Application of values. Sometimes the questions is about how your child is going to apply the value in life. Your child should identify 2 to 3 ways (that are not in the passage) that your child can apply the value in life.

Lastly, I am going to talk about expectations which I am going to show in a table

Expected grade           Expected Section A Marks      Expected Section B Marks
A*                              50/50                                      31/40
A                                50/50                                      22/40
B                                50/50                                      15/40
C(pass)                       40/50                                      15/40

Without a good score in Section A, Its is very difficult to PASS (grade C) and score well in the paper 2. And with a perfect score in section A (50/50) your child had already passed! Section A is growing in importance this year onward.

Some useful resources
Past Year Test papers in 2016 
(disclaimer: I'm not advertising for the above website and I do not benefit in anyway if you click the above links.)



Email me at mrtan.sg@gmail.com
Please identify yourself first and ask only one question.
Thank you.