11 plus comprehension and writing: how to build them at home

The two parts of 11 plus English that practice questions cannot reach

An 11 plus English paper has two halves that feel quite different to a child. One is technical English: spelling, punctuation, grammar and vocabulary, usually tested by spotting the mistake in a sentence or choosing the word that fits. That half is made of small repeating patterns, so short daily practice works on it, and what 11 plus English tests, question type by question type covers that side in detail.

The other half is reading comprehension, and at some schools a writing task on top. Neither is built by a worksheet. This post is about that half: what the questions actually ask, where the skill really comes from, and how much of it fits in a normal week.

Whether a writing task is set at all varies, and so does the weight English carries against the other subjects. Confirm the current arrangements with the admissions authority, and see what the 11 plus is and who sits it for the wider shape of the eleven plus.

Reading comprehension: what the questions ask

Your child reads a passage, usually fiction but sometimes non-fiction or a poem, then answers questions on it. The questions climb in difficulty. Some ask for a fact stated in the text. Some ask what a word means in that particular sentence. The hardest ask for inference: why a character did something, what the writer wants you to feel, what a phrase suggests without saying.

Four kinds of question come up again and again, and they need different things from a child.

• Retrieval. The answer is stated in the passage. The only skill is going back and finding it rather than trusting memory.
• Vocabulary in context. What a particular word means in that sentence, which is often not its most common meaning.
• Inference. Why someone acted as they did, or what a detail implies. The answer is not written down, but it has to be supported by something that is.
• Writer’s technique. How a passage is built to create an effect, and why a particular word or image was chosen.

Retrieval questions are the ones children rush and lose marks on. Inference is the one that separates papers, and it is the one that comes from reading rather than from practice.

The mistake nearly every child makes is answering from memory rather than going back to the passage. The second is treating a word they half know as a word they know. Both are habits, and both are fixed by reading rather than by more questions.

Where comprehension actually comes from

Comprehension is built by reading widely and talking about what was read. That is not a way of avoiding practice. It is the practice. A child who reads for twenty minutes a day and then spends five minutes talking about it, “why did she lie to him?”, “what does ‘reluctantly’ tell you?”, “how did the writer make that bit scary?”, is doing inference every day.

Vary what they read: a novel, a newspaper article, a poem, a non-fiction book about something they like. The passage in the exam will not be a book they have read, so breadth beats depth.

Once the reading habit is in place, a little work on the question format is worth adding, so that “find a word in paragraph two that means the same as” is not a surprise on the day. It is the polish, not the foundation, and it is worth far less time than parents usually give it.

The writing task, where one is set

Where a writing task is set, it is usually a short piece, either a story from a prompt or a piece of persuasive or descriptive writing, marked for ideas, structure, sentence variety and accuracy. Writing is built by writing. There is nothing that substitutes for it.

One piece a week is plenty. Twenty to thirty minutes, planned first, then one round of improvement: pick a single thing to make better, such as varying sentence openings or checking every full stop, rather than correcting everything. A child who is told twelve things will remember none of them.

The feedback matters more than the volume, which is the honest reason this part is harder to do alone than the rest. It does not need a tutor, but it does need someone reading the piece and naming one thing.

Vocabulary runs through both halves

Vocabulary is the thread that ties the two halves together, and it runs through Verbal Reasoning too, where the word-meaning question families depend on it directly. In comprehension it decides whether a passage is readable at all. In technical English it appears as synonyms, antonyms, word meaning in a sentence, and figurative language.

It is built in two ways, and children need both. Reading supplies words in context, which is how meanings stick. Deliberate learning supplies the words a Year 5 child would not otherwise meet: a few new words a day, each used in a sentence, revisited a few days later and again a week after that. Ten minutes on a bus is enough. Do not do a hundred words at once. It feels productive and it does not last.

A home routine that holds

• Daily: read. Twenty minutes, any format, followed by a short conversation about it. This is the foundation of comprehension and vocabulary, and it is not optional.
• Most days: a few minutes of vocabulary or spelling. Short, repeated, spaced, and rotated with a few technical English questions so the mistake-spotting formats stay familiar.
• Weekly: write. One planned piece, one thing to improve, one person reading it.
• Do not do everything every day. How much 11 plus practice a child needs each day covers the overall load, and English has to fit inside it alongside the other subjects.

Where 11+ Daily fits

11+ Daily covers the other half: vocabulary and technical English, across twelve English projects, with the spelling and punctuation ones using the chunked sentence-error format 11 plus papers use, and vocabulary coming back on a spaced schedule so the words stick.

It does not contain comprehension passages or a writing task, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it does is take the daily vocabulary and technical practice off your plate and decide what to work on each day, so the time you have left goes on the reading, the conversation and the one piece of writing a week. See how the Today screen chooses a session, or read what the English paper covers, type by type.

Questions parents ask