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Memorization seems to be pretty strongly predictive of later success ---- !Eric, btw, has written a book on the SAT critical reading section --- I can't wait to read.
That's because you can't do anything without it! If you don't have the factual knowledge at your fingertips, you have no way of putting things together. I learned all my grammar from years of rote work in foreign language class: the reason I can spout off about tenses, to take one example, is that I covered them all in French, then in Italian (adding the imperfect subjunctive), and German (adding yet another form of subjunctive for indirect speech). Worksheet after worksheet after worksheet, looking up every word I didn't know. No one even tried to make it fun. It was simply understood that there was no other way to learn a language.
I have no idea what people are expecting when they ask me how to learn vocab: umm... read a whole lot and look up every single unfamiliar word. Everyone wants there to be a shortcut (so they can get to the fun "critical thinking" part), but sometimes there just isn't.
....[A strict] emphasis on rote learning does have some huge benefits, but it also has some real shortcomings. [I've discussed this with parents] who ... want their kids to be able to sit down and do x,y,z that'll guarantee a score increase, but the reality is that a kid who's basically just learned to memorize things, doesn't read or discuss books on a regular basis, and has very little cultural/contextual knowledge for what they're reading on the SAT is probably not going to be able to pull their score into the 750+ range, no matter how much stuff they memorize. They 1) don't really get the big picture, and 2) miss too many of the nuances....
I need all the advice I can get on teaching academic reading.
49 comments:
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=14425
Had just read the above and came over here for an antidote. Got it. ;-)
dy/dan. "less helpful"
Been there. Done that.
Unfortunately, many parents don't have the choice to just say no.
Remembering things is OK, but memorizing things is not? Even if you do remember things, you get what our son's first grade teachers said to us. "Yes, he has a lot of superficial knowledge."
This is a philosophical gap that cannot be bridged. This teacher didn't care one bit if parents had a different view of education. They are the experts. It's their turf.
"I have no idea what people are expecting when they ask me how to learn vocab:"
In the practice tests my son has taken (CR & writing), he will miss questions because he just does not know a word. He reads quite a bit but sometimes words don't sink in, or he might learn a different spin.
We call it the "hiatus effect". A couple of years ago, he came across that word and asked me what it meant. I told him. He then began to start seeing the word all over the place. He must have seen it plenty of times before while reading. What do they say about advertising; it takes seven times before you even begin to pay attention? We now practice with vocabulary flash cards. It has made a difference since many of the questions come down to simply knowing what a word means. I am not a fan of just leaving vocabulary up to reading a lot.
Another problem is that words often have a particular spin or are used in only one way, but tests LOVE to see if you know the generic definition. I should make a list. Reader's Digest's Word Power test is a good place to see this.
What vocabulary flash cards do you use?:)
the relevant concept here is "necessary but not sufficient."
In logic, satisfying a sufficient condition for a proposition to be true means you've made the proposition true. Satisfying a necessary condition does not, however. Lacking a necessary condition means you won't be able to make the proposition true.
Knowing facts instantly is a necessary condition for any higher order problem solving. But it is not sufficient.
Why anyone thinks that those of us saying "you need to know facts" thinks knowing facts is sufficient is baffling to me. Utterly baffling. It's as if they cannot distinguish necessary and sufficient.
I started my oldest on formal vocabulary study when I realized she could decode anything but she struggled to understand what she read because she was unfamiliar with the vocabulary. She used Michael Clay Thompson's Caesar's English books and is now working through the Sadlier-Oxford Vocabulary Workshop books. My DH used the VW series at the Catholic prep school he attended and swears by them for SAT prep.
Reading a wide variety of challenging books certainly helps to build vocabulary, but I do think a formal vocab program is also useful.
Several years ago, I was in charge of gathering a collection of English words to be used for vocabulary training at the SAT+ level. It would begin with SAT vocabulary to make sure nothing basic was missed, then proceed to post-SAT words that highly literate adults find useful when writing for other such adults.
One thing I discovered was that many words I considered SAT level or beyond were turning out to be uncommon senses or uses of pre-SAT words. The word "people," for example used as a singular (...it becomes necessary for ONE PEOPLE to dissolve the political bands..."Shouldn't that be one PERSON?") or "peoples" ("How can you pluralize a plural?") Or "second" used as a verb with an accent on the first (one verb) or second syllable (different verb:"suh-KAHND"). Many adults considered these words old, familiar friends, yet they still held surprises.
I also discovered many words for which a proper definition required background knowledge: enthalpy, for example, Impressionism, or the real meaning of parameter (as opposed to its misuse as some sort of limit.) If you don't already understand enthalpy, you won't understand the definition of enthalpy. Terms for which background knowledge is necessary for definitions to be meaningful could be called "jargon," but if so, educated writers use a lot of jargon.
Building a rich vocabulary then becomes a multidimensional process that is only partially amenable to simple word->definition memorization. I think that word->definition memorization should be taken as far as possible--it helps a lot--but many other forms of careful study have to go along with it. For years.
"What vocabulary flash cards do you use?"
I chose Barron's because it seemed to have better definitions and pronunciations. I'm not thrilled about them, and we don't "flash" the cards, but it is compact and easy to carry around.
dy/Dan; just went over there to take a look. He decides to lambast Vern Williams analogy of a kid practicing foul shots on a basketball court for house. Williams used the analogy to doing algebra exercises, but alluded to the kid shooting foul shots as being "bored out of his mind." Dan decided to pick up on that and say that most kids who are doing that kind of practicing are NOT bored out of their minds because they have been sufficiently engaged by what the game is about that they are motivated to do the practice necessary to get good at it.
I can say that I did the algebra exercises with the alacrity of the foul shot kid, because it was obvious to me from the first week what the merits of algebra would be Perhaps this was because we were told it was used in science, and I had seen equations in science books and thus knew that math and science were connected Perhaps it was also because we started doing word problems from the first week and I could see that algebra was a LOT more efficient than the arithmetic methods I had used.
But if it makes dy/Dan feel better to pick on Vern Williams, let him do so. I know Vern and have seen him teach. He's been teaching for more than 30 years and anyone who knows him also knows the results he's achieved with his students, and I'm not just talking about gifted students. He doesn't just "tell the students the answer" by the way, but he also does not subscribe to dy/Dan's notion of being "less helpful".
Compared to high-IQ people,
average-IQ "[don't] read or discuss books on a regular basis, and [have] very little cultural/contextual knowledge for what they're reading on the SAT" but as usual the discussion ignores the elephant in the room.
Dan Meyer says:
"There is a place for drills and explanation in mathematics, as in basketball. But consider what little good they do in either arena if the student isn't first made aware of the larger, more enticing purposes they serve."
Ah yes, balance. Who defines the details. Who defines mastery? Who defines how mastery is ensured? How much time is spent on "larger, more enticing purposes"? How does he test for that before diving into drills? Does is work?
In fifth grade, I went to a parent/teacher meeting about Everyday Math and everyone talked about how good balance is. The parents went home, the school just continued to do what is was doing, and the fifth grade teacher had to have an after-school program to ensure that the kids mastered very basic 3rd grade skills. She didn't trust the spiral, she didn't cover 35% of the material, and at the end of the year she sent a letter home claiming victory over problem solving and critical thinking.
Whatever. Apparently, the lower grade teachers can trust the spiral until the fifth grade teacher gets the kids.
Allison says:
"Why anyone thinks that those of us saying "you need to know facts" thinks knowing facts is sufficient is baffling to me. Utterly baffling. It's as if they cannot distinguish necessary and sufficient."
I've struggled with this over the years. I continue to do so. Nobody gets into details. Educators want to talk in vague generalities just to get parents to go away. Then they can decide on all of the detials. It's not about pedagogy, it's cover for low expectations. They know this, but claim that they have to teach "all" kids.
They claim that what they do is better, but then say that they have to teach all kids without separation. They claim that private schools "pre-select" and charter schools "cream", so that's why they can do more. But then they say that "the experiment has failed".
So many arguments make no sense on a fundamental basis. Educators still talk about the generalities of rote learning and traditional education. They disappear when pressed for details or clarifications.
Change won't come from cogent arguments that dig into details.
Why anyone thinks that those of us saying "you need to know facts" thinks knowing
facts is sufficient is baffling to me. Utterly baffling. It's as if they cannot
distinguish necessary and sufficient.
I used to be baffled by this, but not any more -- I've seen it too often, and among
otherwise intelligent people. It's not only a problem in the math debate -- it's
even more pervasive in discussion about early reading instruction.
We know much more about effective early reading pedagogy than we did 50 years ago, but there are those (with whom I would otherwise be in agreement) who lobby for better teaching of decoding skills -- using the sound/symbol correspondences in written English to facilitate recognizing and understanding print -- who clearly do NOT get this, and who insist that if every child were taught to decode well in first grade, s/he would be able to read "at or above grade level" thereafter (never mind that people making such an assertion also don't have an accurate understanding of "grade level"
either).
Of course fluency and mastery in foundation skills is needed in both mathematics and
reading (and many other areas besides -- sports and music, for instance), but the
"necessary but not sufficient" caveat applies. I've posted before, I think, about a
student I had with significant cognitive disability who was a whiz at mental
arithmetic and calculations of all kinds -- converting fractions to percents,
multiplying 4-digit numbers, all operations with fractions, long division (this in
fourth grade) but could not solve even the simplest word problem at a first grade
level because he had no understanding of how these operations applied in real life
settings. His procedural knowledge was fluent. He had a necessary condition for
further mathematical learning, but not sufficient cognitive reasoning ability.
The same goes for decoding -- a child may have fluent decoding skills, which is a
necessary but not sufficient foundation for advanced reading comprehension. But s/he
also needs good linguistic comprehension, general knowledge, vocabulary,
understanding of syntax and nuances of word usage, and more.
Unfortunately people who fail to grasp the "necessary but not sufficient" concept
often make the case for more rigorous teaching of the foundation skills weaker. In
the words of the late Dr. Ogden Lindsley, we should do BOTH -- teach the basics that
require memorization (which we could do much better at present) AND ALSO teach
conceptual understanding, applications, reasoning processes ( as for reading and
writing), related general knowledge and so on.
It seems obvious but clearly is not. I've had this argument for years (not on KTM)
with some phonics proponents who simply do not get it.
@Crimson Wife, yes absolutely, in the long term, formal vocab study is absolute necessary (my post was actually a tossed-off reply to Catherine -- I had no idea she was actually going to re-post it!) I also use the Sadlier Oxford vocab series (7-12th grades, vocab test every week!), and I think it's fantastic. But I also find that kind of rote memorization isn't always enough in the long-term: case in point, I had an (Internet) student last year who attended a top-rated suburban Mass. high school that gives vocab tests every week. Her vocab was a *disaster* (she actually missed every single sentence completion in a CR section once). She would learn the words for the test and then forget them. As always, it's not a question of either/or but rather of both: you need to read a lot AND memorize vocab. That's the only way you pick up the more more esoteric words and the second/third meanings, which is where a lot of kids really fall down.
Formal vocabulary study is not particularly useful. The percentage of the population who know a lot of words is extremely small, and they didn't acquire it be reading, but by being extremely smart.
But formal vocabulary study helps the middlebrows who like to think they're smart pretend they're accomplishing something.
Most people with excellent vocabularies acquired it without trying, and no, it wasn't reading. Everyone else has to be conscious about it, and it's not going to be achieved by "studying" vocabulary.
*The percentage of the population who know a lot of words is extremely small, and they didn't acquire it be reading, but by being extremely smart.*
I can't resist. I tried, but I couldn't.
So, how do the extremely smart acquire their extensive vocabularies once books are out?
Do they know words they've never encountered, even in root form?
Are they given secret, highly informative lectures by older extremely smart people with excellent vocabularies?
Pray tell! I am guessing that you don't read a lot and have an excellent vocabulary.
Cal, I'm waiting with baited breath for your answers to Jen's questions.
And I have one of my own: Without acquiring vocabulary from reading, how do smart people learn the difference between breath that's restrained and breath that smells like worms?
As an aside, I'm really enjoying my daughter going through the delightful stage of using big words in speech correctly, mispronounced but phonetically proper.
You know the one -- as she expands out in to more and more complex reading, that's where she is now learning her big words.
So, Cal, I guess I'm not sure what you're saying. My daughter is taking the same path I did, which I always assumed most others with a large vocabulary did -- there's a medium-sized core of words that you hear in daily conversation and there are a gazillion more complicated words that you encounter primarily in books, but that very uncommon in average conversation.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, because it seems to fly in the face of my experience.
Pssst Glen -- you can tell those two apart by spelling -- it's actually bated breath.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1414/what-is-the-origin-of-bated-breath
Which was my point. They sound like the same word. The only way to learn that they are two different words is by seeing them--by learning them from reading.
Also Sprach Cal: Most people with excellent vocabularies acquired it without trying...
After years of living in Asia, certain features of my native culture became more noticeable. One was our naive belief in excellence without effort.
NOBODY in China would ever claim that most excellent vocabularies came without work. With several thousand characters needed for even basic literacy, they would liken extended vocabulary development to the back-breaking job of rice cultivation--knee-deep in the muck, one shoot at a time--not to hillsides spontaneously erupting with wildflowers.
Chinese Kung-Fu superheroes endure years of torturous training in hidden mountain hideouts before emerging with superpowers. Ours get bitten by radioactive spiders and discover their gifts.
My son's third-grade teacher loved him for his mathematical mind and his love of learning. Then I made the mistake of showing her where it all came from (torturous math lessons in our kitchen hideout), and she stopped admiring him--in fact, stopped liking him!
I can't begin to express how baffling our teacher's reaction would be to a teacher in Japan, where mastery is revered and is attributed to doing work that non-masters aren't willing to do.
Cal is turning into a drive-by troll.
i'm probably drive-by, but not a troll. I read this blog sometimes, not out of admiration, but rather befuzzlement that relatively smart people can get so much wrong with so much self-satisfaction.
Vocabulary acquisition is primarily a function of IQ. I did not say that people don't acquire vocab by reading. I said that people with exceptionally large vocabularies did not acquire it by reading or by a vocabulary study. They do it organically, without trying.
Is there anything wrong with putting yourself through a vocab study? No. Just don't delude yourself that it will do much to improve your SAT or GRE score (you're better off learning how to use your existing verbal logic), and don't be surprised if your kids don't magically get huge IQs. You'll pick up a few dozen, maybe a hundred words. That's not all that much.
"Vocabulary acquisition is primarily a function of IQ."
"Primarily"? Can you separate the variables and calibrate this effect?
"I said that people with exceptionally large vocabularies did not acquire it by reading or by a vocabulary study."
No. This is what you said:
"The percentage of the population who know a lot of words is extremely small..."
So, now "a lot" becomes "exceptionally" because you are trying to weasel your way out. This seems to be your typical MO; start with the provocative statements and then leave youself enough wiggle room to justify yourself.
"They do it organically, without trying."
Where is your proof? Define "organically".
"No. Just don't delude yourself that it will do much to improve your SAT or GRE score .."
Where is your proof. I can show you many test problems that are only based on whether you know the meaning of a word or not. On these tests, a few correct answers can have a large impact on your score. Although studying vocabulary may have a statistical effect (based on a lot of variables), many others (at your IQ level) are doing this preparation. The preparation might have a point of diminishing returns, but preparation is not statistically meaningless to your score - or to colleges.
"...and don't be surprised if your kids don't magically get huge IQs."
Strawman.
You still can't or won't try to separate the variables and calibrate their effects. You're stuck on a high level IQ explanation for everything that becomes meaningless when you look at the details and individual variables.
I see no real difference between "exceptionally" and "a lot". Both are a function of IQ. I'm assuming the people in this conversation talking about studying vocabulary to get a better vocabulary have higher than average IQs, as is true of everyone posting opn a blog.
and don't be surprised if your kids don't magically get huge IQs."
Yeah, I meant "magically huge vocabularies." Brain glitch on my part.
Steve, I have been a test prep instructor for 9 years and know far, far more than you do about preparing kids for the verbal section.
The original SAT and the GRE tested direct knowledge of vocabulary extensively. The SAT renormed in 1995 in large part because high verbal scores were incredibly rare--the GRE, which was never renormed, showed that only 2% of the population got over 700 on the verbal, while 4% got an 800 on the math.
When the SAT was changed in 2005, vocabulary was de-emphasized. If sheer memorization would do the job, far more Asians, who spend hundreds of hours in tet prep, would get 800s. Moreover, high verbal scores would be more frequent than high math scores and even now, after the simplification, high math scores are more common.
So if you want to spend hours and hours and hours memorizing hundreds of words, on the off-chance that a word you didn't know before will be on the test, and that you have the verbal logic to successfully understand the nuances of the question (which is where most people fail, not in vocab), fine. I suppose you have little better to do. But it is at best going to get you 10-20 points and quite possibly going to get you nothing.
The best way to improve your verbal SAT score is to understand how the questions are constructed and improve your use of your existing verbal logic. This method is worth hundreds of points for many people and doesn't require hundreds of hours.
More importantly, I thought the discussion at hand was not about memorizing for a couple extra questions on the SAT but improving your vocabulary in a sustained way.
Vocabulary is measured in the thousands of words, not hundreds. If you are effective--and that's unlikely--sustained vocabulary instruction and reading books might bump your existing vocabulary by a hundred or so words.
All of the data I cited about the Verbal score distribution is a cite, and it's a cite demonstrating the truth of my assertion: vocabulary acquisition is almost entirely a function of IQ; exposure (which does not have to be reading) is necessary but not sufficient.
I don't have to "separate the variables and calibrate the effects". That's the sort of nonsense the anal retentives on this blog do! There are several online sites that measure your vocabulary count (in thousands of words). Measure yourself. Go study vocabulary. Come back and measure it again. If you get even 1000 words, which is a huge number and yet miniscule in terms of vocab knowledge at the top level, well done!
The best way to improve your verbal SAT score is to understand how the questions are constructed and improve your use of your existing verbal logic. This method is worth hundreds of points for many people and doesn't require hundreds of hours.
I'd disagree on this point. For most of the kids I've worked with, improving their verbal logic skills is far and away the most difficult part of prepping for the SAT -- no one wants to hear that it's the fastest route to a score increase. They're rather blame the test for not agreeing with what they think. It's the part they're most resistant to since it requires actual thought, and they just want to memorize things (and their parents just want them to be able to memorize things). A lot of it also runs directly contrary to the kind of free association that thought that runs rampant in schools, and undoing it is one of the least pleasant parts of my job. Ever tried to get a kid to summarize paragraph without deviating from the literal meaning? If you've tutored verbal extensively, you probably know that it can be like pulling teeth. Most of the kids who can do it own their own don't need huge amounts of tutoring. That's why I typically spend little to no time doing things like drilling vocab -- I have zero interest in what my students can memorize, only what they can do with the knowledge they have. If they don't want to put in the time and learn things, that's not my problem, and I make that part clear. I can't do it for them, and I'm not going to check up on them and make sure they're doing it. When they come to me and apologize for being too busy, I just shrug and tell them they're the ones who have the take the test.
But that said, there is a core group of about 300 or so words that the CB loves: equivocal, esoteric, sycophantic, trite... I'd argue that it is actually worth someone's time to sit down and memorize those words because the chances of them showing up on the SAT are much, much higher than, say, "obviate." Not all hard vocab is created equal when it comes to the SAT.
By the way Cal, I think that I can fairly say I have a verbal IQ higher than most people's, but I got my vocab from years of reading and formal study. I was also lucky enough to attend a well-funded high school that exposed me to a level of literature that I wouldn't have encountered in many American high schools, that placed a very serious emphasis on vocabulary, and that offered Latin. Nature AND nurture -- as I've said, it's not an either/or prospect. Yes, I retained more of it than some other people might, but I didn't simply imbibe it through some mystical process -- I worked my butt off for it.
I agree with Glen 100%: Americans place far too much of a premium on innate ability; they expect things to come easily and then get frustrated when they don't. While I've worked with some kids who were not exactly intellectual giants, the ones who put in the work generally got what they wanted. That doesn't make them geniuses, but to me that makes them a lot more admirable than someone who sits on his (or her) ass and expects a high score to be handed to him because he's "smart." I've tutored a bunch of those too. Yes there are some true geniuses who will simply get to a level far beyond most people's seemingly without doing a whit of work, but they are the absolute outliers, the top .00001%. For most people, it isn't so clear-cut.
"The best way to improve your verbal SAT score is to understand how the questions are constructed and improve your use of your existing verbal logic."
The issue wasn't the "best way". You are changing the subject.
"More importantly, I thought the discussion at hand was not about memorizing for a couple extra questions on the SAT but improving your vocabulary in a sustained way."
Try rereading the title of the thread. Was anyone talking about memorization as the best or only way to improve scores? My son had to draw (with crayons) over 100 science terms in 6th grade as a way to remember them. No, he could memorize them in a fraction of the time.
"I don't have to "separate the variables and calibrate the effects". That's the sort of nonsense the anal retentives on this blog do!"
Yes you do. It's the fundamental failing of all of your arguments. You can't calibrate the effect. You hijacked the thread with, once again, your fixation on IQ as if everyone would be astounded that it is one of the variables.
Whatever valuable information you might have to offer is lost when you step on your soapbox to show everyone how smart you are. The most interesting things you have to say usually come when you have to backtrack. Then again, you can't resist the ad hominem attacks.
As one of those extremely high IQ ( 5 sd above the mean, 800 verbal on the SAT twice pre-recentering, 800 verbal on the GRE twice, multiple 800's on SAT/GRE subject tests), I can comment on how *I* amassed a huge vocabulary.
Not by osmosis, nor "organically" on the one hand, nor by study or tutoring, on the other.
My parents tell me I was interested in words from an early age, and found me reading a dictionary with a flashlight under the covers. I have no recollection of this, nor of any special interest in dictionaries. But I did notice words, and play with them. Anagrams. Palindromes. Antigrams. Spoonerisms. Puns. Double-entendres. I read voraciously -- as a child, teen and young adult I averaged 350+ books per year, mostly fairly dense non-fiction. My first book report, in third grade, was on "Walden." Of course I missed most of the political content, which I only appreciated much later.
Some factors that definitely had an impact:
1. I learned several languages, including Latin and Greek, and read in all of them. Thus new words could often be grasped from their roots. I did not have to look up "Weltanshauung" or "chthonic" when I first encountered them, because I could figure them out from knowing the relevant vocabulary in German or Greek.
2. I rarely "looked up" new words I encountered in reading, at least at the time, but I would scribble the word and the page number on an index card (I used to use them as bookmarks) and while reading the book I would, naturally, notice the word on the card repeatedly. If I hadn't determined its meaning by the time I finished the book I would usually look it up, or ask somebody. Willingham has made the point, "we remember what we pay attention to." So by paying attention to new words I remembered them.
3. I hung around with other nerdy, high-vocabulary people.Our conversations weren't particularly high-vocabulary, but the stimulus to learn and explore new fields of knowledge and share intellectual passions certainly made a difference.
4. My idea of fun in high school was playing Scrabble, Boggle, and a few lesser-known word games. A high moment was going out in Scrabble playing "coccyx" on a triple word score.
5. I wrote a lot. Mostly rubbish, but pre-email and social media I corresponded at length with nerdy verbal friends. Thus I had the chance to use some of this esoteric vocabulary. Very little of the SAT/GRE and other rare vocabulary is transmitted orally -- certainly not in television or radio, even that aimed at educated audiences, and not -- according to data -- in the conversation of college professors or professionals.
If I were advising parents, or teachers, about developing vocabulary I would encourage a playful attitude as well as a practical one -- make it fun. Savor words for their intrinsic interest, their power to clarify thought, the beauty of lyrical language. Pay attention to them and you will learn, use and remember them better. Enjoy.
SAT Verbal Tutor--perhaps I'm simply a more effective SAT instructor? I have no such difficulties getting students to accept the importance of verbal logic. They think my reasoning makes sense.
Americans make too much of innate ability? Our educational and social policies deny its existence. As for your moralizing about our supposed love of quick fixes that, too, is antithetical to anything American. I seriously don't know what you are talking about.
Anonymous--I am as "out there" as you are on the verbal IQ chart, and I didn't do any of those things except occasionally pick up a dictionary. (I did crossword puzzles, though.) And there's absolutely no question that your high verbal IQ was the cause, not the effect, of your nerdy interests.
I am not arguing against reading or an increased focus on words. I think that moving someone from 5000 to 5500 words, or 15000 words to 16000 is a worthwhile goal. I am merely observing that the efforts described in this discussion will do little to get to the top tiers of vocabulary. Such people are born, not made, and they should not confuse their preferences with the underlying ability.
I think Cal is correct that vocabulary size largely depends on IQ. The reason for this is that high intelligence is needed to grasp subtle concepts and make fine distinctions, and low-IQ people cannot do this. It takes a certain IQ to distinguish, for example, between similar words such as "reluctant" and "reticent" or "polite" and "obsequious".
IQ is correlated 0.71 to the 10-question Wordsum vocabulary test.
"I said that people with exceptionally large vocabularies did not acquire it by reading or by a vocabulary study. They do it organically, without trying."
I'm an 800 Verbal GRE gal (or at least was in 1994) and I think reading is really important for vocabulary acquisition. Oral English has a much smaller vocabulary than written English, which is why parents of smart non-readers should worry.
Knowing foreign languages and roots is also important, just as it would be in a spelling bee.
One piece of good news for parents today is that electronic books can encourage looking up words. My 9-year-old has a Kindle and my husband says that she often looks up words on the Kindle. In normal life, with a print book and a print dictionary, it's just too slow and too cumbersome to look up words with any frequency, so we generally just rely on context and repetition.
"I am merely observing that the efforts described in this discussion will do little to get to the top tiers of vocabulary."
"Merely"? Too bad you didn't stop to see if that was what people were talking about.
People were talking about increasing their (or their kids') vocabularies through memorization, vocabulary study, and reading. Given that the people in this conversation are probalby already in the top 10-20%, I was telling them it was a waste of time.
Given the other posts on this blog, I find it hard to believe that they weren't talking about reaching the top tiers. This is a group that fondly imagines itself uber.
More backtracking and another attack. You should realize that your blogging MO is not to have a discussion, but to show how incredibly smart you are and how incredibly stupid everyone else is, even those with high IQs.
Ooookay.You're one of those people that everyone backs away from, because you don't blink and keep repeating yourself, aren't you?
My first post says exactly what I meant it to. And if that post or any of my subsequent posts made you unhappy in any way, then my time here has been well spent.
My first post says exactly what I meant it to. And if that post or any of my subsequent posts made you unhappy in any way, then my time here has been well spent.
We're all so proud of you, Cal.
Shorter Cal: Smart people have high IQs and learn things more easily than people with lower IQs.
[Turns out posting this doesn't make much of an impression, so...]
Cal posting: Smart people don't need to read or really, have ever read, to have big vocabularies! They just KNOW stuff that's how you know they're smart. Like me.
Cal commenting on his posts: What? You didn't understand what I really meant just because it wasn't what I said? You're not so smart, I guess. But I still am.
Vocabulary was actually the highest of the sub-tests when my DD took the Weschler preschool IQ test and later, the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT). I still think she benefits from formal vocabulary study. I'm not so much concerned about prepping for the SAT or ACT but rather to help her with her reading. She had reached a point where her vocabulary (strong as it may have been for someone her age) was the limiting factor in comprehending what she was reading.
It's cumbersome to have to stop reading and look up words in the dictionary. I've found that spending a bit of time in our homeschool systematically working through a formal vocabulary program has really paid off in terms of her reading.
Vocabulary size is a product of IQ, richness of exposure, attention to language, and time. Increase or decrease any factor and you scale the resulting product accordingly.
It's not a denial of the importance of IQ to note that this factorial structure makes every other factor important, too.
In practice, a superior vocabulary requires that all factors be at least good and that one or more be great.
It's hard to make IQ great, but as long as it's good enough and you have the time, you can significantly increase the richness of exposure and attention to language with explicit study. You choose more challenging readings for yourself, your child, or your students. You pay (or call) attention to linguistic elements, definitions, roots, etymologies, relationships with other known items, and so on. You buy a dictionary, and you use it.
And the earlier you start, the more time you'll have.
My impression is that most people with superior vocabularies take explicit steps to improve them. But even if that's just "middlebrow" projecting on my part, I'm quite sure that people with exceptional vocabularies get the exceptional parts primarily from print.
Adult and even late-teen vocabularies become exceptional by transcending the conversational. We read the works of writers who lived generations before we were born or in countries we've never seen, and we become familiar with words and phrases that no one within our conversational ken ever uses. We read books and articles written by specialists in fields we don't work in and get used to seeing words we never hear.
I'm not saying that these words are literally never heard in conversation, just that they are encountered far more frequently in writing, and that is where they are mastered. Reading, often enriched by explicit study of language, makes the difference between familiarity and unfamiliarity with the words and phrases that constitute a superior vocabulary.
"And if that post or any of my subsequent posts made you unhappy in any way, then my time here has been well spent."
I'm not unhappy at all. I achieved my goal. Apparently, IQ isn't all it's cracked up to be.
My 9-year-old did her first year of Latin this past school year and this summer she's been having a go at the unabridged Don Quixote. Anyway, during the course of her reading she came upon the new-to-her word "errant" (as in knight errant). C immediately put 2 and 2 together and realized that "errant" meant wandering. She was very pleased with herself and is planning on reporting this back to her Latin teacher. (I believe her Latin program devotes some time to Latin roots of English words.)
Anyway, you can see from this story how seamlessly intelligence, knowledge of foreign roots, and understanding of literary context work together to produce understanding of unfamiliar vocabulary. Take out any one of those ingredients and misunderstanding may result. At C's age, I hadn't had any Latin (still haven't), and my best guess for the meaning of "errant" would have been "in error."
Here's another vocabulary story, taken from foreign language study.
The first several years of me learning Russian, every single word learned was very hard-won. I had to sweat to build up even a very rudimentary vocabulary. Some years later, I was a fluent speaker and was working in Russia. At this point, the words just stuck to me by themselves. I could hear a new word in conversation and just automatically know what it meant, thanks to context and roots. It was totally effortless.
In the early years, I had been lucky to pick out a few words from a sentence that I understood. At that time, I didn't know enough of the context to be able to make educated guesses about unfamiliar words, because such a very high percentage of words were unfamiliar. It was like starting a 1,000 piece puzzle and only having a few pieces connected.
I don't know exactly how to map this onto the experience of acquiring an advanced vocabulary in your native language. I would note that when I was really rolling with Russian vocabulary, I was 1) totally primed to go and 2) in a very rich environment. Interestingly, I'd done a semester abroad in Russia a year or two earlier and really struggled--the effortlessness was the product of earlier struggle.
I think that Glen summed it up well with "Vocabulary size is a product of IQ, richness of exposure, attention to language, and time. Increase or decrease any factor and you scale the resulting product accordingly."
For none of those is it the case that "formal vocab study is absolute necessary" as SATVerbalTutor claimed.
My son is an avid reader and has acquired a fair amount of his vocabulary that way (sometimes evident by his mispronouncing words). He also learned a lot the same way other kids learn words: by hearing them used a lot. Despite Anonymous's claim "Very little of the SAT/GRE and other rare vocabulary is transmitted orally -- certainly not in television or radio, even that aimed at educated audiences, and not -- according to data -- in the conversation of college professors or professionals," I believe that most of the SAT vocabulary is in common use in our house. We also do a lot of word play.
"I believe that most of the SAT vocabulary is in common use in our house."
"Most".
Once you bring the SAT into the question of vocabulary, things change. If you don't actively spend time studying word lists, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage to others in your peer group. I've already discussed my surprise at some of the words my son doesn't know (or has a limited understanding of) even though he reads a lot. In the grand scheme of things, this count does not add up to much, but a study of SAT vocabulary lists, roots, suffixes, and prefixes really is absolutely necessary. You think that this would be less necessary at the upper score end of the test, but this is the place where just a couple of missed questions can drop your score dramatically. I saw this on my son's PSAT test. I saw the questions, the specific words, and how much his score dropped.
Of course, this is just one component of a well-balanced SAT diet. Now that my son is entering his junior year, I'm much more sensitive to SAT test prep, but my goal is to get the maximum benefit with the least effort. I would never dream of just trusting his "organic" exposure. However, this does not have to be a big deal. My son already knows most of the words on the lists and he memorizes quickly. Why shouldn't I have him study word lists? We know how to test for vanishing returns.
SAT is supposed to reflect aptitude, but most students prepare. This preparation might not have a primary effect on your score, but it does change the game at each level. Gone are the good-old days when nobody prepared. Wasted or ineffective preparation is a separate issue.
Then there is the question of keeping all of this in perspective. If one talks about test prep, there is the risk of being seen as extreme and chasing vanishingly small differences. I call those the "yeah, but" arguments, as if people have to list all of their caveats before making any comment at all.
"I believe that most of the SAT vocabulary is in common use in our house. We also do a lot of word play."
My favorite SAT word that no high school student has yet known (except for my own poor kids who have heard me tutoring): treacly.
Churlish is another rather old-fashioned word that doesn't seem to be in favor currently. ;-D
My own kids have a pretty extensive vocabulary -- they were not necessarily learning entirely new to them words when doing SAT practice tests, but instead were finally nailing down an actual meaning.
That is, they'd finally really *know* the word in isolation, rather than being able to understand it in context.
Those who don't know treacly must not have been Thomas the Tank Engine fans. What literature is that word found in?
And there are treacle tarts, too!
I assume that my son knows that "treacly" means "sticky like molasses", but I've not checked.
I would be bit surprised if he know the difference between "treacle" and "golden syrup", though, as he is not very interested in food or British names for food ingredients.
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