
How We Guide Students to Interpret Figurative Language in English Comprehension
Figurative language appears frequently in English comprehension passages, but many students still struggle to explain its meaning in context. The difficulty is that the writer may not mean exactly what the words say on the surface. Instead, a phrase may suggest an emotion, create an image, reveal an attitude, or shape the mood of a passage.
In our lessons, we often see students recognise that a sentence “sounds figurative” but stop there. The stronger skill is being able to explain what the phrase means in plain language and why the writer has used it.
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