PSLE 2021 Editing Component – Three Ways to help your child succeed in this component

The Editing component of the English Paper 2 consists of 10 mistakes that students must correct. The mistakes are evenly divided into 5 grammatical mistakes and 5 spelling mistakes. Students are awarded 10 marks in total for this section of the paper. With the changes in the Paper 2 component for PSLE 2025, students will now be faced with correcting 10 mistakes in the passage instead of 12 mistakes.

How can your child succeed in this section?

This section is one of the easiest to score. All you need is a good grammatical foundation. Being a whizz at commonly misspelled words can also be extremely beneficial. This is why our P6 students are given different Editing spelling lists throughout the year. These are also great for review at home just before the examinations. Now, let’s use the PSLE 2021 Editing section (with 12 mistakes instead of 10 mistakes) as an example.

1. Identify your mistake

The first thing that I teach my P5 students when I introduce this section to them, is how to identify the mistakes in this section. Knowing which mistake is a grammatical mistake or a spelling mistake will ensure that students are able to find the correct answers. While the mistakes in the 2021 PSLE Editing section are straightforward and clear, students do come across trickier exercises that can confuse them. Make sure to identify 6 grammar mistakes and 6 spelling mistakes. Students at TF need to write down ‘G’ or ‘S’ at the side of the boxes and we encourage them to identify the grammar structure that they are testing. For example, number 39 is testing ‘Verb to Noun’.

2. Know your grammatical rules

To be able to correct grammatical mistakes in this section, students need to have a good grammar foundation and solid sentence structures. This should be focused on in the P3 and P4 years and that is why at TF, our P3 and P4 teachers spend a lot of time explaining to students the grammar rules and correcting their sentence structures in their weekly compositions. Having a good basic foundation will ensure that in the P5 year, students just need to learn the new, more complex grammar rules introduced and the P6 year is all about revision and practice. Now, let us take a look at the 6 grammar mistakes in the PSLE Editing component.

39) Verb to Noun

The answer is ‘reunion’. The word ‘reunite’ needs to be changed from a verb to a noun. The noun of ‘reunite’ is, therefore ‘reunion’.

Knowing the nouns of verbs and adjectives is important in the upper primary years. Students come across this grammar rule often, especially in the Synthesis & Transformation component. Personally, I feel that it is a shame when a student gets this wrong as one can excel in this simply by memorising the nouns. This is why I provide a list of adjectives & verbs to nouns to both our P5 and P6 students every year and we make it a point to test them.

40) Object of a preposition

The answer is ‘whom’. if a student knows when to use whom, they will know that a preposition is followed by ‘whom’. For example, ‘with whom’ and in this case ‘of whom’.

42) Past Perfect Tense

The answer is ‘chosen’. While all students know how to use the past perfect tense, the difficulty may lie in knowing the correct past participle of the irregular verb ‘choose’. This is a common mistake among all students and memorising the list of past and past participle of irregular verbs is part of our P3 and P4 programme.

43) Past Tense

The answer is ‘passed’. While this is relatively easy, some students can get confused between the verb ‘passed’ and the noun/adjective/adverb ‘past’.

46) Singular & Past Tense

The answer is ‘was’. Students will need to find the subject in the sentence to identify if it is Singular or Plural and if the sentence is in the past, present or future tense. In this case ‘Another of her favourite hangouts’ is considered Singular while ‘used to’ is considered in the past.

48) Preposition

The preposition ‘after’ is used as the phrase ‘waiting for half an hour’ indicates that a certain amount of time has passed.

3. Learn your spelling

The rest of the mistakes in this section are spelling mistakes. The words are usually those that students often make mistakes in. One of the ways that we help our students is to give them a list of commonly misspelled words at the start of the year. Our P5s and P6s get this list in January while our P4s get their list in February. Below is the list of spelling words taken from the PSLE 2021 Editing component. You may also check our list of other PSLE years’ (2017-2020) that I previously collated for everyone here editing words

41) opposite

44) nostalgia

45) museum

47) reminisce

49) embarrassment

50) twentieth