<p>I recently begun SAT teaching and I have some students with high ambitions but horrible vocabularies as far as the SAT is concerned. Meaning that many of the words in a question 1 or 2 of the section--that are ranked "easy" or "level 1" or "level 2" are not known. These are words that are probably not "SAT" words or in standard vocabulary boxes. </p>
<p>Is there an "easier" list of vocabulary that perhaps I can encourage such students to begin memorizing ASAP? Ideally in the form of vocabulary cards that can be purchased, as opposed to a list in a book or an online list. Knowing my clientele, I know this is the only format that would work, if something were to work. </p>
<p>For example, I'm not talking about words like "abstemious", "acerbic", or "ephemeral" but rather words like "dignified" "pretentious" "succinct" "affair" "reciprocate" that are more likely to be everyday words albeit amongst a more educated circle. I would be surprised if Direct Hits or the like are focusing on words like the ones I just highlighted in the second group.</p>
<p>First of all, abandon the dumb as a rock idea to memorize … vocabulary lists. It is one of the least effective “methods.” </p>
<p>This is what you do. Get a big stack of tests from official sources and tell your students to attack them with a dictionary at hand. Tell them to read the tests and mark every word they do not understand and look up the meaning PLUS have them understand the context. </p>
<p>They do NOT have to try to answer the questions, but they do have to READ the texts with attention. </p>
<p>Fwiw, reading lots of official tests helps in many ways, including getting really familiar with the entire format. Reading vocabulary lists does not offer proper context and lacks the secondary and tertiary meanings that make the SAT more difficult than it appears.</p>
<p>Thank you for your suggestion! Are you saying in general that you’d never advise vocabulary lists? Even for students who are already scoring reasonably well on the sentence completions but don’t know a word here or there? </p>
<p>By big stack of tests, do you mean the sentence completion sections, in particular, and within those, specifically the 5 answer choices?</p>
<p>Never is a big word. There are VERY few cases where studying list of words might be helpful, but it will always remain a poor method. Even in its best incarnation a la Direct Hits that offer the correct context, the method is not better than working through the tests. The dumbest attempts are trying to memorize the 3500 words a la Barron’s.</p>
<p>All in all, there are few reasons to learn lists of words, Even the poorly prepared foreign students would do better by reading the tests with a dictionary in hand. The studens who already do well should NOT waste their time in reading vocabulary lists to “pick” one or two words. Learning proper techniques to approach the SC sections is the key. Look up Mike Barrett and the Black Book/Grammatix for a method that works wonder without the lists boondoggle. </p>
<p>As far as your question, it is confusing. You mentioned that the objective is to learn basic words. This contradicts the focus on Level 5 SC questions. But the answer remains the same … have your students go through the ENTIRE test and hunt for words they do NOT understand. Anywhere and everywhere.</p>
<p>Reading through a test does not take that long!</p>
<p>Now that I’ve thought about that some more, my concern with that approach is that I think the students think they understand words that they do not really know. I also find that the students tend to have fewer vocabulary issues with the passages and the writing–I’m presuming those are the sections you have in mind and not the math (the test is sentence completions, passages, grammar multiple choice, and math so if not just sentence completions then I guess these other 2 parts?). </p>
<p>In contrast, with the vocabulary cards, it might not provide context, but it forces them to have some association with the word. I’ve found with the more advanced students that after they get that association, that they can then build that context from going through actual questions. </p>
<p>Maybe I’m thinking about this entirely incorrectly.</p>
<p>I’m not questioning whether a test takes too long to read through. But I only have so many tests. And if I use them up, it makes it harder to do practice critical reading drills if they have kinda read through the material. </p>
<p>I already teach the students approaches to how to logically reason through sentence completions. For the top students, how should they learn words that come up somewhat frequently but that they do not already know (e.g. caustic)?</p>
<p>The purpose of taking practice tests is to …learn to get better! It really is not an exercise in measuring the scores. Accordingly, you should not worry about “running out of tests.” It is quite easy to assemble a powerful collection of current and … older tests. Think various colors of the “Blue BooK” as it used to be White and Red with tons of tests that are still very applicable for the SC and Reading sections. Throw in the multiple tests that are released and float around the web, and your students will collapse before you run of test. </p>
<p>Seriously, if you have students who are willing to read through dozens of tests and make sure they understand all the words along the way, you should get wonderful results. And, fwiw, you can set aside 3 or 4 tests to measure their current success (if that is important to you.) </p>
<p>All in all, working through the tests in a LEARNING mode works much better than in a “test taking” mode.</p>
<p>I have been tutoring SAT for 4 years. I do use vocabulary lists and make my students memorize hundreds of words. They create hundreds of flashcards in the process and it does work. There is no way around it, in my opinion.</p>
<p>@xiggi What about my concern that students incorrectly presume they know words that they really don’t? Do you read through the exams with the students to ensure this situation wouldn’t arise? What type of pace do you encourage? And then should they turn these words into flash cards? </p>
<p>What if a word like caustic comes up from time to time but doesn’t happen to come up in any of the exams that I have? While I like this approach very much, it doesn’t feel comprehensive.</p>
<p>We have had similar discussions on CC for more than a decade. I went as far as providing complete lists of words several times, and entertained the tedious discussions about “how many times” does a word come up. The “hits” are simply abysmal and confirm what a waste of time the exercise truly is. </p>
<p>As far as being comprehensive, how do you think the creators of lists went to work? They simply culled all the existing released tests that were easily available. The silly Barrons did not even bother using the SAT as they “sold” their GRE list and repackaged it as a SAT list. The bottom line does not change … it is an imperfect method, but one that is utterly pleasing to … lazy and uneducated “tutors.” Flash cards, list of words, are simply devices that serve the kindergarten students, and are not appropriate for HS students. All they are is easily built and marketed. The more powerful alternatives simply take more time, and rqequire tutors to understand how the test work. Telling students to memorize endless lists of words is easy and is also terribly uninteractive. Does not get any simpler than that. It’s easy money as it places the burden on the student without having to measure the “progress.” Continue to do poorly on the Verbal and it must be because one did not learn 3500 or 10,000 words. What a racket! </p>
<p>If there is a list that might work, it is one short one that is based on developing the recognition of prefixes and suffixes. But we are talking about a list of 100, perhaps 200words at most. </p>
<p>To put it simply, they are NO lists that are predictive. At best, they are reactive, and along the way they force students to waste much time through a process that does little to build a vocabulary, let alone develop the necessary reflexes and memory recalls. </p>
<p>Check the depths of this forum, or read the sticky threads that discuss the vocabulary lists. We could spend another 10 years and still remain anchored at the same point. </p>
<p>PS As far as your student not marking words they really do not understand … it should be easy for you to develop a small quizz based on the words that might challenge you. There are no reasons why the students would lie about not “getting” words. Make sure to ask them to list words they also waffle about. Again, the process is one of learning, and we all know that we learn best from our mistakes.</p>
<p>I appreciate your really thorough response!</p>
<p>My only comment about comprehensive is that I do not have every exam on which these lists would be based. </p>
<p>I don’t completely follow your exercise still. I would ask a student to go home, read an exam for homework, write down every word that is unknown, request that he look it up, and then memorize those definitions. </p>
<p>My concern was that say there are 100 words he really does not know, he is likely to confuse a word he recognizes as a word he knows or maybe even guess it when he reads it in the context of a passage but if it were as an answer choice of a sentence completion he’d not know it. I’d imagine if the true count is 100 on a given exam, he’d flag only 20.</p>
<p>I have compiled my own lists. And I have the students make their own flash cards and we continually add to the pile. Where in the country are you located?</p>
<p>pretentious, succint and reciprocate are definitely SAT words. They are included in the Essential 500, if I remember correctly. As for the remaining words you mentioned, I think they can be found in a TOEFL word list. “400 words you need to know for TOEFL” or “Complete guide to the toefl ibt”.</p>
<p>Speaking of word list, we all admit that Direct hit is good for SAT. Does CB make use of Direct hit, or does Direct hit collect vocabs from CB?
And how does CB respond to DH? If they want to get rid of DH all they have to do is to buy one book and make sure not to use any vocab that is included when making a test, right?</p>
<p>I’ve been doing a combination of both approaches implied here, and seeing improvements in my sentence completion scores as a result. At the least, I do not find memorizing vocabulary words from a box to be as evil as I gathering from the direction in which this thread has headed.</p>
<p>My approach has been as follows:
I did a first pass through a list of 200 SAT words, finding a list of words that I knew a priori that I did not know well but were apparently higher frequency for the SAT. I did not stress out about memorizing exactly what was on the card but rather just trying to get a general association of the word in my mind.
I then look at sentence completions that contained these words as choices, think about whether the word could make any sense, and use this context to sharpen my understanding.
I’d take note of any remaining words that I did not confidently know, making a list of these words to look up in the dictionary. Thank goodness that list was reduced because of words I already had on flash cards because I, personally, would rather flip through the cards than look up words in a dictionary. </p>
<p>I imagine people just have different approaches based on their styles of learning. The medium of flash cards that I’ve purchased is just more effective to me than making my own with the dictionary. </p>
<p>Unfortunately we’ve detoured from the original poster’s question about the easier vocabulary words. I cannot comment on that because the words I’ve been studying are more like the ephemeral words rather than the succinct and reciprocate words. It is a fair question.</p>
<p>Again, any word list worth its salt simply borrows from existing released tests. Does TCB care? Nope, as they have an unlimited source of words at their disposal. Not to mention that they laugh at the silliness of building a predictive list. </p>
<p>Care to know some VERY hard words that trip students? How about low, bark, table, or rank. Think about cows, foxes, motion and cigars!</p>
<p>By the way, we have not detoured from the OP question. The key to success remain the same. It is ALL about preparing in the correct context, and that is with a test in front of you. At all times!</p>
<p>I feel like I struck a chord by starting this thread. I am very sorry about that.</p>
<p>I see benefits to both approaches: vocabulary flash cards and reading exams. I never intended to suggest a weakness with reading exams. I repeat–I think it is a great approach.</p>
<p>If someone out there does support vocabulary flash cards, I’m just wondering whether there’s an easier set out there than what is in DirectHits.</p>