<p>As a junior, I'm taking the AP English Language exam in exactly two weeks. Unfortunately, I'm abysmal at the multiple choice section; usually I'd get caught up in long sentences or tangled in the ridiculous diction to perform decently on the questions. </p>
<p>I faced a similar problem last year concerning the SAT Critical Reading, and once I learned the "chunking" method, it helped me with my problems immensely; my CR score went up about 200 points. Would this kind of method work for the passages for the English Language?</p>
<p>Also, are there other tips out there? Some passages are decent and I can read/comprehend them with no difficulty, while others contain three-line sentences with no paragraph breaks in sight.</p>
<p>Get CliffsAP English Language and Composition and study the MC out of that book. It will help a lot in figuring out how the MC works. With any MC, process of elimination is key. Work on getting rid of the answers you are absolutely sure are wrong.</p>
<p>For me, I used to be horrible at MC also. Now I get nearly every question right as long as i know what the answers mean in terms of definition. so i’m pretty set there.</p>
<p>All I do is look at the first question, or second question, and try and scope out where it is in the passage… then read ONLY to that section. it’ll make sure you don’t take in any other information that might trick you. then just keep doing this for every question; you should actually finish reading the passage after the last few questions. then i would recommend checking over all of your answers, now that you know what the passage is all about, and also consider the questions and what they are asking you to focus on; that’ll help you with the theme, tone, blah blah english words. Just think that the questions are there to GUIDE you into understanding the passage. So most likely the questions will be related somehow.</p>
<p>Yeah - today in our AP English class we took a passage section, and this time I chunked, and improved my score by a lot. Still not as well as I’d hoped, but I’m pleased with the progress. </p>
<p>Chunking with passages is a method where you read the questions first (before even looking at the passage), and identifying where that question’s answer would reside in the passage. I usually mark up my passage - boxing the relevent lines that certain questions ask for, circling words questions ask us to define, etc. After reading all the questions, and getting a gauge for what the questions ask, I start reading the passage. When I stumble upon a boxed passage, or a circled word or phrase, I immediately know that there’s a question on that, so I can stop and answer that question. This method helps because you’re not thrown off by things said later in the passage that are not relevent; if a question asks for the author’s purpose in line 4, you shouldn’t let his counterargument in line 60 change your answer, although CB would definately put this in their distractors. </p>
<p>Chunking most noticibly helps with the “boredom” aspect. Without chunking, it seems like you’re reading simply for the sake of reading, but that’s not the purpose of taking a test. The purpose of the test is to answer questions [correctly], and by chunking, you can even eliminate areas of passage where you won’t have to read.</p>