<p>How long would you recommend an international to study for CR and W to get 700+ considering his/her English is not up to the required level? how many hours per week? any experiences? And when is the best time for an international to take the exam?</p>
<p>As many hours per week as you can manage for as many weeks as you have before the exam? It’s kind of hard to mimic the result of 18 years of full-time language immersion with a bit of shot-term preparation.</p>
<p>That being said, if you have a hard time with the SAT, consider taking the ACT instead. I found their language sections to be a lot easier on non-native speakers than the SAT’s. I got a 34/36 (99th percentile) with ~30 hours of preparation.</p>
<p>30 hours for the entire exam, that is. Not just the language section :)</p>
<p>I can’t say how much time it would take for Writing, but I think that it’s near impossible for studying for CR to make too much of a difference. From what I’ve seen, Maths and Writing are generally improvable sections, but CR is (usually?) more rigid.</p>
<p>As b@r!um said, you’re not going to be able to cram enough words or phrases in to have a good shot at significantly improving your score. The best advice I can give you is to read lots more books :P.</p>
<p>(a warning: this could very well be bad advice - I have no concrete evidence; everything I’ve said is based on my impression of what helped me/people I know).</p>
<p>^^^^^^
I agree with the reading. I went from 700 to 790 on CR by reading classics during the summer.</p>
<p>@ Barium: The ACT seems easier because of the additional science section that balances out everything…but the Reading seems to be a problem for me 
… I don’t really know why…can you give some tips for that?</p>
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<p>I concur, if english is not your first language, I think the only way for you to get anywhere is to practice it everytime, whenever it is possible.
What grade are you in anyways ? If you’re a senior and you don’t think your english to be good enough to reach at least 600, I’d say you’re kinda late… Otherwise, it’s doable.</p>
<p>@ Bilguun: Did they really help? According to other threads, reading for a short time doesn’t seem to help much…What classics did you read? Do you have some tips for the CR?</p>
<p>@ Elou24: Do you have some tips for the CR?</p>
<p>It depends if you’re a senior or a junior. If you’re a senior, I wouldn’t recommend you to start reading classics now. I find it to be absolutely pointless, since there will be too many things to absorb in a pretty short amount of time. If it’s your case, just practice in the blue book, read the newspapers, etc.
If you’re a junior, then I guess you could relax a little bit because you can improve a lot in a year (I could hardly write in english at all, a year ago). And yup, you might consider reading as much as you can.</p>
<p>Maybe I am the exception, but I thought ACT English and Reading and Writing were easier than the SAT sections. Are you having a hard time with ACT reading because you are running out of time? That’s what I had the most trouble with, but a bit of practice took care of that.</p>
<p>If it helps, I took the ACT twice. The first time I only had time to do 3/4 reading passages. I filled in random bubbles for the last one. (The ACT does not penalize guessing!) I ended up with a reading score of 30. Either I am a really lucky guesser, or the ACT does not expect you to finish the reading section at all. Anyway, with a bit of practice I actually managed to finish the reading section the second time around and got a near-perfect score on it.</p>
<p>The one piece of advice I have for ACT reading is not to read the entire texts. When I took the ACT, the passages seemed to go on random tangents. For example, the author might have spent an entire column describing the scenery. And then there was not a single question about the scenery at all! Since the questions are (were) sorted in chronological order, it helped me to answer them as I was reading and skip lengthy passages that did not have any questions at all. Another useful skill is skim-reading: spotting the answers to the questions (given that they are in chronological order) quickly without reading every single word carefully.</p>
<p>But if you have already practiced a lot for the SAT, it might be better to stick with that. Good luck with whatever test you decide to take!</p>
<p>@omega007
Reading a lot definitely helped a lot. Aside from classics reading NYTimes helped too.
But this way of improvement is probably only for those who have the whole summer for reading.
Although I believe reading classics was most helpful, almost any good read will improve your comprehension, if not also vocabulary.
I read almost everything Jane Austen
The Last of the Mohicans
The Scarlet Letter
Anna Karenina
Frankenstein, and about 10 other books.</p>
<p>Thanks Biliguun, barium and Elou24!!!</p>
<p>Anyone else who has great tips?</p>
<p>i have actually downloaded some of the vocabulary lists and had a look at them- you don´t have to study them but seeing them a few times helps. plus, what i personally think helps me (at the moment lol im studying for the sat too) the most, are the kaplan sat classics. books that are read in high school here (what provides with a few general examples for the essay, too) where the sat words come up more often (scarlet letter has 870 words, for ex). there are some on sparknotes, too, but those are novels… well, they seem like novels written for 16-year old idiots that don´t read anything else than pop magazines- horrible, i couldn´t read further than the 2nd page. but, as i said, there are some solid classics out there, if you´re a quick reader you can read them within a week or so, besides studying. it especially helps, when you had a look at the vocab lists first, and then recognize the words in the books.
good luck!</p>
<p>Can you please tell me where you downloaded the vocab lists? </p>
<p>@Bilguun: just wondering how did you manage to read THAT many books in one summer? And those aren’t easy reads seeing as they’re classics.</p>
<p>I pretty much became a bookworm after I got the taste of reading good books! lol.
And our summer vacations start in May, so by summer, I mean about 3 months, which is enough for about 20 or so interesting books. I basically read two books every week, but managed to read only one when I started reading something horrible like Plato’s Republic.
I also forgot to mention that Wuthering Heights was very helpful too. Sometimes after reading challenging literature, SAT CR passages seem to be as easy as TOEFL passages!</p>
<p>Bilguun…one more question regarding the classics…how did you face any tough or unknown vocab words you came across?..did you lookup the dictionary immediately or did you list them for later memorization?..and what did you do when you came across tough sentence structures?..Did you reread the sentence or did you ignore it?..And did you skim read or scan the texts?</p>
<p>That’s a good question.
I have to say that behind all this reading was largely the motivation to get a good SAT score, so I looked up every word I didn’t know, and even words I did know, but wasn’t quite sure of. SAT can kill you with secondary meanings of words!
I basically thought of every word I encountered and didn’t know as: “This might come up on the SAT, so I better look it up”, but I never did more than looking up the definition in a dictionary.
However, however many words I learned by reading, percentage of those words coming up on the SAT was very low. Looking up all the words, your vocab will grow rapidly but chances are that those words won’t come up on the SAT CR (but a good vocab is always great). For pure SAT vocab, I’d recommend getting Direct Hits. You’ll learn all the SAT vocab you need from there but as an international, probably still won’t have the comprehension needed for a very high score.
That’s where reading a lot kicks in. I usually can feel as my reading comprehension increases. By reading various books, I learn to adjust to various types of writers quickly and by the time I finish a book I know the authors writing habits to such a degree that their initially hard to understand prose just flows by.</p>
<p>As for the hard sentence structures, I’d usually read just as I’d do when reading for pleasure. Sometimes, when a hard sentence seems unimportant, I’d just leave it but most of the times I try to understand everything because of the same “SAT motivation” I mentioned before.</p>
<p>I usually read everything with normal pace slowing down when needed and speeding up when reading through easy stuff.</p>
<p>But remember that improved comprehension does not come easily or speedily, especially when you’re not exposed to the language on daily basis. I’m saying this because many people would get discouraged after reading about 3 or 4 books when they don’t see immediate score increases. I’d say that at least 10 books would be needed to see significant score increases.</p>
<p>Reading will help improve your reading speed and general reading comprehension, but it won’t do very much for SAT vocab. That being said, I highly recommend you read things you <em>enjoy</em> (not necessarily classics). You will probably spend more time reading when you like the books you are reading, and it will be a more pleasant experience.</p>
<p>I think I learned a lot from reading without looking up the words I didn’t understand. After my first two or three novels in English, I noticed that I got a lot better at guessing the meaning of a word from context, something I had a very hard time doing initially. (Of course, if there are 5 new words in a single sentence and you have no idea what it means, please look them up so you won’t lose the plot line.) </p>
<p>Depending on which part of the verbal section you are struggling with, you might gain more from reading or targeted vocab review or a combination of both. As Bilguun pointed out, reading is not the most efficient way to polish your SAT vocab, but it will certainly increase your general vocabulary in the long run!</p>
<p>@ Barium…if Reading doesn’t help with SAT vocab, i guess it should surely help with the ACT reading. What do you think?</p>