Students appearing for competitive exams (SAT, CAT, GMAT, GRE) often struggle with poor marks in the reading comprehension section. In general, all languages take time and effort to master and English is no exception. Here are some tips for students. Depending on the time available for preparation, you may pursue some or all of the techniques mentioned below:
Read a lot of books: No surprises here. Reading more is the best way to improve your reading comprehension. Students that are voracious readers, read more and faster than those that are not. They are able to understand a complex matter better in a single reading than someone else may in multiple attempts. Its important to cultivate reading as a hobby while young. Most students start with fantasy fiction like, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson etc. before moving into more advanced books like Twilight or The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Provided below is a list of books recommended by College Board for college bound students. While this list includes a lot of classics, reading current non-fiction books is equally helpful. However, if your exam is in a few months, you may need to make extra efforts.
So please read on.
Read an English newspaper daily, including the editorial section: Build the newspaper into your daily routine. Reading news is easy, there are a lot of facts, reporting and comments that are easy to remember. Reading the editorial section is more difficult. You are reading the editors views and analysis of a complex issue. Try to read deliberately and slowly. After reading, spend a few minutes thinking about the idea that the writer was expressing. Are you able to write down what the editorial was saying? Go back to the passage and read it again.
Now compare the editorial with what you wrote. Were you able to write down some of the concepts, most of them or all of them? You will notice a marked improvement within a few weeks of practicing this way.
Through extensive experience (both my own and other students), I strongly recommend this strategy.
Learn five to ten new words daily: A strong vocabulary is a major asset. You can understand more complex passages and authors and know just the appropriate word to describe a particular situation. Even if your tests are in three months, learning 5 new words daily means 450 new words added to your vocabulary. No matter where you are starting from, this improvement in vocabulary will be a huge improvement.
Reading books, reading newspaper editorials and expanding your vocabulary all help strengthen your English language foundations, especially in reading and comprehension. An average student that diligently follows the above three steps sees major improvement in three to six months.
Practice for your test using high quality preparation materials and online resources: Since the objective is to appear for a competitive test, you have to find high quality preparation materials and resources focused on that test.
Start early and appear for a diagnostic test.
Spend time analyzing your mistakes. This is probably the most crucial part of test preparation. Set out a day of the week (say, Sunday) when you will appear for a mock test. After the test sit down and check the answers while the test is still fresh in your head. Focus on the ones that you got wrong. What were you thinking when you chose option A instead of option D? Were you undecided between both the options and went with one over the other? Do you realize why your answer was wrong?
Understand your strengths and weaknesses. After two mock tests, you should have a strong idea of the topics where you are doing well, topics where you need some improvement and topics where you need a lot of improvement. EZ Scholar provides a powerful online platform for SAT and ACT for high school students. The diagnostics enable the student to understand their performance, strengths and weaknesses. This allows the students to allocate their time appropriately to get the best possible results.
Time is the most important resource while preparing for an exam. Knowing where you stand and where to invest the available time wisely is crucial to getting the best possible score. You do not have time to attend all coaching classes for all topics. Identify the topics where you need help and attend those classes. Test, Practice, Rest & Repeat. It is a simple strategy.
Recommended Reading List for College-Bound Students
Author Title
Anonymous – Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Miguel de – Don Quixote
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
Morrison, Toni – Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George – 1984
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allen – Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
Shakespeare, William – Julius Caesar
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles – Antigone
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry – David Walden
Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire – Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse Five
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard – Native Son
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