<p>Ok, I'm gonna be a sophomre in high school, and after it seems like the primary focus of the English class is on vocab. My question is why the heck is my school busy teaching vocab when the new SAT, new PSAT, and the current ACT have all done away with the useless vocab section? In fact, someone from SAT once said that students forget all this useless vocab when they put their pencils down. I'm getting really worried because my ACT English is the weakest section and I'm afraid that I'm going to fail the grammar portion. So Why is my school wasting our time with vocabulary when we should be learning grammar??</p>
<p>You don’t need a strong vocabulary for standardized exams. You need it for life.</p>
<p>Not necessarily…in everyday conversation we rarely use words like defenestration. Most difficult words are found in classic novels, and we can always just look those words up.</p>
<p>I actually would have preferred if I had learned more vocab and taken it more seriously. You need it in basic life because you can come off as unintelligent if you have a severely stunted vocabulary compared to your peers. In your professional life you will definitely need it. You need it here because the slight differences in connotation and denotation between words can have drastic consequences. This is easily seen in political and scientific communities. You may think that your vocabulary is fairly complex but I would encourage you to listen more carefully how recent college graduates converse and you will probably see that they have much more powerful eloquence and rhetoric that they could not even utilize without an extensive vocabulary to pull from.</p>
<p>P.S. the words that are difficult do not show up only in classical novels. They show up frequently in contemporary novels as well. You just have not been exposed to sophisticated contemporary novels. Most teenagers are only exposed to young adult novels which have to simplify the text in order to make it accessible to the target audience.</p>
<p>Because a broad vocabulary is its own reward, and education is more than a path to a career.</p>
<p>You never know what the CB means by “uncommon words”, As far as I know, the mission of CB in the beginning was to prepare students for college. ( if you watch a MIT video on youtube, you’ll know why you need a strong vocabulary background) College standards for vocabulary has not changed, the textbooks colleges use have not changed, and the rhetoric of college professors has not changed. My school in Bellaire, Texas still uses the same vocabulary book to teach students. To make a speculation, the CB has reviewed recent usages of vocabulary in colleges, textbooks, and perhaps other sources and has found that some words are outdated and others are used more commonly. In my opinion, the CB will take out outdated words and conduce learning of more frequently used words in our generation. </p>