Unraveling sentence complexities in reading comprehension passages: A deconstructive approach for competitive exams
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Abstract
Competitive exams serve as reliable and standardized assessment tools for entry into universities and workplaces alike. Beyond assessing language skills, they meticulously evaluate the ability to reason logically and analyze information. Reading comprehension plays a pivotal role in these exams since it evaluates the reasoning skills and language ability. Sentences in competitive exam reading comprehension passages are intentionally intricate to puzzle the readers. This paper advocates deconstruction of passages whereby the sentences are broken into parts to analyze the twists in the sentence structure, decipher the ambiguities, and comprehend them completely. It shows the results of an experimental study that involved a heterogeneous group of about eighty tertiary learners. They were trained to break the sentences, simplify the complications, interpret the meanings accurately, and answer the questions that follow. Passages and sentences from competitive exams such as the GRE, GMAT, GATE, IELTS, TOEFL, etc., are used to create real-time problem-solving scenarios. This intervention exposed the learners to several sentence styles and refined the structural awareness of the passages. Thereby, the learner improvements in performances were evaluated. It is evident that deconstruction and syntactic analyses have influenced the interpretation of the passage and enhanced accuracy.
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