My experience tells me that a large part of SAT “reading comprehension” is vocab-related. When I go over tests with kids–yes, even those in the 700s, even native English speakers educated in the most celebrated high schools–I invariably find that most of their errors can be traced to vocab. They don’t realize that the word “betray” in an answer can mean “to reveal” as well as the more common “to break someone’s trust.” They see a tone question and don’t know the difference between “wistful” and “nostalgic.” They miss a contrast in a sentcom because the clue in the sentence is “belie.” They miss an answer because it’s paraphrased from a line in the passage, and paraphrasing means “expressing the same idea in different words,” but they don’t know the “different words.”
The notion that every student should reinvent the wheel and study the vocab from past tests isn’t a bad one, but those lists are already in existence. They’re not 200 words long, unfortunately (there have been a lot of past tests!), but they exist. When I put aside my reflexive disgust for rote memorization, swallowed my pride, and began (A) generating carefully curated vocab lists with hand-pruned definitions, (B) writing sentence completion quizzes and exercises, and (C) holding students–all of them, every time–accountable for learning the words, scores shot up. Like wow shot up. While putting this more rigorous vocab program into practice, I didn’t at all back away from text analysis, reading methods, etc.–I just augmented it. It made my course much more challenging, but it turned out that it precluded many, many students from having to come back for another round. One pretty rough summer seemed to take the place of a slightly more leisurely summer and winter, in other words, and the improvement data was much more reliable.
This isn’t the only way, of course! Students are all different, and very motivated preppers can achieve remarkable gains with many different methods. But this one is foolproof, in my experience (again: 13 years doing this full time with several hundred students a year).
In the end, though, I support whatever works for people. Feel free to disbelieve my claims! But I’ll continue posting whenever it seems like “vocab doesn’t work” is dominating the narrative. Believe me: I’m not posting this stuff for my benefit; I have far better things to do with my time (I’ll be working a 13-14 hour day today).
My students are mostly from boarding schools in the US (and elsewhere, but mostly US) and international schools in Asia (and elsewhere, but mostly Asia).
Marvin, do you think I have debunked the vocabulary myth for my own benefit? About ten years ago, we had debates on CC about how list XYZ was relevant on the most recent test. For simplicity sake, I posted the extensive lists of 3500 and 5000 words (the horrible ones a la Barron’s) and even added one culled from the … Red Book. It still floats around the web! From the discussions, it appeared that FEW words were NEEDED to find the correct answer. I posted the numbers and the hits were abysmal and entirely trivial.
On the other hand, correct techniques were very important. But you know that!
Perhaps we should repeat the experience with a recent QAS.
I think part of this discussion has to do with the time that a person is willing to spend. Undoubtedly if a person has the inclination to learn lots and lots of words, that is going to help. And I have had many students who have gone about as far as they can possibly go on CR without learning more words. They just aren’t going to get any more questions right without improving their vocabulary.
But not all people are going to be willing to take the time and stick to the routine necessary to learn the number of words that they probably need to learn in order to make an appreciable difference. And in general I think that more can be done to get better at reading comp in a shorter amount of time, albeit with proper guidance. (I am talking about learning how to approach the passages and how to navigate the questions, not studying vocab.)
Again I think this largely depends on the time that a person is willing to put in and the kind of prep that a person is doing. If they have a teacher or tutor and are going to put in 20hrs of work total, I think their time would be better spent on RC. If a person is going to do much, much more than that and if they are studying on their own then learning lots and lots of words in their spare time will certainly help and that is definitely something that is very easy to control without a lot of outside assistance.
But one of the great things about vocab is it doesn’t require an expert tutor–it can be done for as little as 15-20 min a day on Quizlet, and over the course of a summer (or a year, at that slow rate), a student can absolutely master all the necessary words.
Vocabulary is important for most international students like me. I had to use words in June’s test like arduous, insolence, mendacity, and pragmatic… All which I learned from vocab lists.
Unfortunately for you vocabulary haters, words are important, because you can’t do the logic if you don’t know the full meaning of the word.
My kids got together with a study friend and pooled their targeted vocabulary lists, flash cards, whatever and then threw out all the words they could jointly agree they knew inside and out. That left a greatly reduced list of words to cover. As they worked through them, one would usually become the tutor for the other as different words came up. Once again, when they both agreed they knew the word, it was thrown out. Ultimately that left them with a very small list of words to be researched.
For some students, learning vocab is fool’s gold, even if it is from a well-designed list. Like doing the problem of the day, it is not nearly enough and yet it lets you claim to yourself (and your parents) that you are doing something to prepare for the test. And you can do it in little bursts and then deceive yourself about how much you have done.
Compare that to the relentless and steady time investment it takes to do what @xiggi is recommending. Sitting down with the blue book and working honestly through passage after passage, investigating words you don’t know, in the context that the SAT uses them, is sure to improve your vocabulary. But more importantly, it is sure to raise your reading score. But you can’t do it in little spurts. And it’s harder.
@pckeller Id don’t understand how vocabulary is “fool’s gold”. It’s everything on the SAT. You can’t answer the questions if you don’t have a grasp of the key words.
My experience with every standardized test my dyslexic teen has ever taken is that a majority of the entire test is vocabulary related. If you don’t understand the words, you have no hope of doing well on the tests. Now that the math section of the new SAT includes many paragraphs, I see greater difficulties for kids like her who haven’t had the 1 on 1 tutoring that she’s had.
Marvin100 and Xiggi apparently use different study methods. Each on its own could be right for the right people, but a mix of methods may work too.
Studying effectively can mean different things to different people. I preferred reading to studying vocabulary lists, but I know people who like lists. They process and retain info. differently than I do. Even different types of dyslexics (whose IQ’s vary as much as neurotypical students) process info. in different ways, so their study methods can differ. My DD would have an easier time separating vocabulary practice from test practice because the tests encompass a broader range of skills (vocabulary, finding the main idea, and endurance) while working on vocabulary separately involves working solely with the words. Neurotypical kids may benefit from trying different approaches too.
We’ve never used vocabulary lists on their own as study tools. I’ve always chosen vocabulary books that have one set of words per lesson that it breaks down into parts and tells what each part means. The student has to manipulate them (add prefixes, suffixes, identify synonyms and antonyms, paraphrase sentences, and use them in their own sentences, etc.) throughout the chapter. I initially got them as a tool to help her learn to read, but I liked the them so much that I’ve continued using them.
I suppose I’d suggest students try a mix of what Xiggi and Marvin100 suggest and adapt it to your own learning style. I’d have to break the words out separately, like Marvin suggests, but learn them in context (using vocabulary books) like Xiggi suggests. Actually, now that I think about it, my parents took us to the library every week when we were young. I read all the time (with a dictionary next to me) and if I ran out of books before the week was over I read the dictionary until it was library day. So I didn’t use vocabulary books when I was young but, after seeing what’s available, I would now just because studying language is fun.
@JustOneDad - you’ve provided the anecdote about the experience of your children with respect to learning vocabulary. Could you also share how much their work helped; i.e. how much of a score improvement they saw?
I haven’t made any claims on improvement. My students studied in order to fully prepare themselves to take the SAT once. Total amount of time spent on vocabulary couldn’t have been more than 8-10 hours. Once you cull the words, you are down to a very few that you need to look over and the partner method is very useful in providing understanding and retention.
So I’m not clear if there is any relevance to your posts on this thread. Sure, its a great story, but we’re trying to understand the benefit of studying vocabulary lists. If you think there is a benefit, great, but it would be helpful to understand the context, especially if your students’ preparation led to improvement. If not, I think I’m missing something.
Vocabulary is key to answering questions on the SAT. You can’t answer the questions correctly if you don’t know the words.
If your student had a proper amount of reading quality literature in their education, the vocabulary study becomes less important. My students did it to make sure there wasn’t anything they had missed. Students with a smaller vocabulary to begin with will find they get even greater benefit from studying it.