The exam-style question
This is an ESL reading comprehension question, in the style of the English as a Second Language papers. Read it as you would in the exam, then compare your plan with the model.
Read our short text and answer in your own words where possible: (a) Why did Lina start the garden? (b) Give two problems she faced.
(c) How did the neighbours help? This is our own practice material.
Lina's Rooftop Garden
When Lina moved into the crowded apartment block, she missed the vegetable patch her grandmother had kept in the village. The city, she felt, was all concrete and no green. So one weekend she carried three sacks of soil up six flights of stairs to the flat rooftop and began, with a few cracked pots and some seeds saved from a market tomato, to make a garden of her own. It was not easy.
The rooftop caught a fierce afternoon sun, and her seedlings wilted until she learned to water them at dawn instead. Strong winds, funnelled between the tall buildings, twice knocked her pots over and snapped the young stems. At first her neighbours thought her plan foolish. But when the first tomatoes ripened, red and sweet, an elderly man from the third floor offered her his old watering can, and a family upstairs began saving their vegetable peelings for her compost.
By summer, the grey rooftop had become a small, shared green world.
Model response: ESL reading comprehension
In reading comprehension, marks come from answering the exact question asked. Use your own words where you can and give the right number of points.
A trial lesson can compare your child's own answer with this model on ESL reading comprehension.
Common errors we see
- Retelling the passage instead of answering the specific question
- Giving one point when the question asks for two
- Copying long stretches word for word with no rephrasing
- Answering a different question from the one asked
- Adding detail the question did not ask for and missing the key point
How this maps to the mark scheme
Examiners mark against assessment objectives. These are the skills the paper rewards.
For ESL reading comprehension, the objectives in play are listed below. The wording is summarised for Cambridge IGCSE English as a Second Language (0510) on our qualification page.
- Understand and identify specific factual information in texts.
- Understand meaning that is implied rather than stated directly.
Find the specific information the question asks for, then check the implied meaning where the question needs it.
Other boards word their objectives differently, but the same skills earn the marks. Your board's official syllabus gives the exact weighting.
Where to go next
Learn the method in our guide to ESL reading comprehension, then try the ESL reading comprehension practice tasks. You can browse every annotated model response or see how we teach this in our English as a Second Language tuition.
When you have written your own answer, take it to a paid one-hour trial lesson and the teacher who would continue will mark it with you.