Primary English Comprehension: Do you use TAPS?

In my earlier post on doing primary English comprehension questions presented in the table form, I talked about the necessity to ensure that there is no lifting and the answer is grammatically accurate. Today, I am going to introduce TAPS, a rather common method used for checking of answers to open-ended questions in primary English comprehension.

TAPS stands for:

Tense

Answer

Punctuation

Spelling

How can TAPS be used to check the answers in comprehension?

Tense

First and foremost, the child should have already circled and identified the tense used in the question. (e.g. Where did Alice see the cat?) With awareness of the tense, look through the answer to see that all verbs are used in the correct tense. This is especially important when the answer from the passage had been in the form of a direct speech or when the answer is required pupils to give their own opinions on an incident.

Answer

There are two parts to checking the answer.

1) Did you lift an answer?

An answer is considered to have been lifted if it was copied and pasted from the first word to the full stop with no change at all. Some schools and teachers are stricter with regards to this practice and lifting is awarded an immediate 0 mark. Hence, if the practice of lifting is highlighted by your teacher, make sure to check that you have avoided this after doing your work.

Note that this does not apply to language questions that require a sentence or phrase to be given!

2) Did you answer the question?

“Tom’s mother made pizza that night. “

If this is the answer, what would the question have possibly been? “What did Tom’s mother cook that night?” Actually, the original question was, “What did Tom had for dinner?” and the answer should be “Tom had pizza for dinner.” The answer above is a classic example of how a child knows where the answer is but is not answering the question.

Pupils need to check whether they have crafted their answers such that they had answered the question. One way to do that is for pupils to cover the questions and based on their answers, come up with a question during checking. If the question they came up with match that given, then there is a good chance the child has answered the question. This is a skill that needs to be practised repeatedly under guidance and will aid pupils when they have acquired it.

Punctuation

You will be surprised to know that one of the most common punctuation errors is the omission of full stop at the end. Be cautious and put that full stop at the end of the sentence. It costs 1/2 mark each time and a few missing dots will come at a high price. Other punctuation errors include missing upper case and also commas for very long sentences.

Spelling

This is an easy one to check and precisely because it is easy to check, children often assume they are right and do not put in the effort to refer to the passage for the words. Every effort pays off, please make it a point to spend that extra few minutes to check the spelling against the words in the passage!

Out of the four elements, I would think that only “answer” requires practice and skill to be accurate. The other three elements just require caution and the right attitude. Try out this systematic method of checking your work today by writing down TAPS beside your answer after checking each element.

Checking for understanding, recognising question requirements, tackling question types in a structured manner, understanding common errors, avoiding careless mistakes – Compre Cook has got them covered. Have the essential strategies at your fingertips because you will need them in order to score.