"Will reading old books help my vocabulary on the SAT?"

So you're stuck reading Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Melville's Moby-Dick. You find yourself wondering whether the effort will be worth it: will any of this reading pay off when it's time to take those dreaded SATs? Can reading old books help me develop my SAT vocabulary?

The short answer to this question is: probably. Why? Because many of the words used in those old books are still very much in circulation.

You have two types of lexical libraries in your head. In linguistics, these libraries are called "passive vocabulary" and "active vocabulary." Passive vocabulary is associated with listening and reading; active vocabulary, which is usually smaller, is associated with speaking and writing. Passive vocabulary develops first: as a baby, you spend about a year producing no understandable words, and during that time, your rapidly self-wiring brain is greedily absorbing all the language it hears. Even when you finally start speaking, your passive vocabulary continues to grow. Trying to get your active and passive vocabularies to be about the same level is one of the Great Quests of your life. Many people are voracious readers; this by no means guarantees they'll be competent writers.

This biological reality obtains all throughout high school: your brain is still self-wiring, believe it or not, so everything you cram into it will have some sort of influence. The authors you're reading in English class are master word-slingers; they don't write a lot of "Duhhhh..." and "Uhhhh..." dialogue. Instead, they tend to lace their prose with phrases like "a vexatious situation" and "her surreptitious glance"-- almost as if they knew that, over 150 years later, someone would be needing such vocabulary to score well on the SAT.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to be curious about the words you encounter in your reading. Look up every single word you don't know; don't simply rely on context, because context can be misleading. Make flashcards, write sentences, look the words up on Google to see how they're used by others. Do everything you can to help yourself! Don't act as if your test results are a matter of fate. They aren't. You control your destiny, which means you're responsible for how well you perform on those crucial exams.


_

sharpening your TOEFL listening skills

For students looking to improve their TOEFL listening skills, the TED Talks website is a wonderful tool:



TED Talks ("TED" stands for "Technology, Entertainment, and Design") are brief, entertaining lectures under 20 minutes in length, given by innovative thinkers from a variety of fields-- lab science, information technology, the arts, and business among them. Some of the lecturers speak at a blazingly fast rate; others lecture a bit more slowly and naturally.

Because the TOEFL exam involves a large, academically-themed listening component (even the Integrated Writing section involves listening), the importance of developing good listening skills cannot be stressed enough. The short TED Talks offer TOEFL students a marvelous opportunity to watch and listen to-- repeatedly if necessary-- the sorts of lectures that would occur on the TOEFL as a way of developing their note-taking and listening comprehension skills. But how? you ask. How can I use TED Talks to help me on the TOEFL? Here are several suggestions.

Method A: Note-taking

1. Watch a video. TED Talk videos are almost always less than 20 minutes long.

2. Wait a couple hours, then re-play the video, this time taking notes, BUT DO NOT WATCH: merely listen to the video (cover your monitor with something). On the TOEFL, as you know, you will hear extended lectures with no video; you should simulate those conditions at home.

3. From your notes, try to distill three or four main ideas from the presentation.

4. Write a paragraph that succinctly summarizes the talk you just heard.

Method B: Transcription

View the video once without doing anything else. Wait a few hours, then view it again, using one or both of the following tactics:

1. Try transcribing the first two minutes of the video you've selected. As accurately as possible, write down every word the speaker utters, adding appropriate punctuation. Ignore any stammering or random utterances (such as "uh..."). The result of your efforts should be a script. Or, alternatively:

2. If you feel you've caught a lot of information from your first viewing, find the most interesting part of the video, and try transcribing two minutes from that section. Check with me to verify the accuracy of your transcription. (Tutoring rates apply!)

The TOEFL exam's primary focus is on academic speaking and writing. TED Talks-- even the more artistic ones-- are all academic in nature, which makes the TED website a marvelous resource for TOEFL students. But keep in mind that the Net is large: TED is not the only website with material. YouTube is a perfectly good source as well; type a topic into YouTube's search window, and you'll find plenty of professorial lectures there, too.

There's no way to improve language skills except by using language. Practice speaking, reading, and writing, and be clever in finding ways to practice listening. Ask yourself the "Five W" questions as you listen: who, what, when, where, and why? Who is the lecturer?* Who is his/her audience? About whom is the lecturer speaking? What is the speaker lecturing about? What are three major points the lecturer makes in his/her presentation? As for when: is the lecturer talking about the present? The future? A moment in history that is somehow relevant to our present and/or future? As for where: what parts of the world does the lecturer reference? Does geography or environment play a role in the speaker's presentation? Does the speaker's talk have local or global or cosmic or even metaphysical implications? Why is this talk important? In what way is it relevant to the audience and/or humanity in general?

Listening is not merely a passive activity; you need to be engaged and questioning while you're listening, not merely nodding your head. Be proactive so that you can succeed on the TOEFL, and consider using TED Talks (or other online resources) as a way to study.

---

*You may have to do some outside research to figure this out.


_