Author: Mark
Text Reading Level: B1
Often, when English language learners try to take the Reading and Writing SAT, it is very difficult for them! They find the texts too hard to read, with many words they do not understand and questions that confuse them.
Why does this happen?
Many teenage English language learners do not really care enough about learning English. It is not very important to them. These kinds of students often want good test results quickly without doing the work that makes that happen. For some tests, this is possible. However, it is not possible to do this with the SAT. These students see learning English as something they only have to do in a classroom. They might have never gone to another country, and might never have needed to use English outside of a classroom before. This makes them think about English in the wrong way – they think that using English is always like answering questions in a textbook. They might think that guessing the meaning of sentences from one or two ‘key words’ is always good enough when reading, because doing this allowed them to get the correct answers in textbook questions in the past. They might not think about grammar much and just use sentence structures from their own language – they might just try to fit new words they learn into collocations and structures from their own language instead of learning how they should really be used. This behaviour causes them to fail the Reading and Writing SAT! (It would cause them to fail the IELTS test too!)
Why?
The SAT is a test for native speakers! The questions expect you to know how to use English to introduce ideas, support ideas with evidence, emphasise ideas, criticize ideas, compare and contrast ideas, and disprove ideas. You need to really understand many sentence structures and linking phrases in order to do this (many of these would not normally be taught at your school or in your language classes)! You cannot guess the right answer in these questions by just looking for a couple of ‘key words’. You must have a very good vocabulary! The exam often uses words that have several different meanings, and tests you to check if you understand all the possible meanings.
American students who take the SAT spend years studying science and literature in English. They read many books when they are at school and have to write reports on what each book is about and why the writer wrote the book in the way they did. For 2 or 3 years they practice reading books from the recent past, and books from much longer ago! Think about your language, has it changed much in the last 200 years? Some of the books these students read are from 200 years ago! Their English is very different to the kind of English that you (an English language learner) might learn at school.
The Reading and Writing SAT tests people on many different kinds of English, English from recent stories, English from old stories, English from very old poems, English from scientists and other academics, and general English as well!
It is hard to learn to understand all these different kinds of English. So, when you decide that you want to study for the SAT, you must take it very seriously!
You must start learning English inside and outside the classroom. You must want to read books in English, not because a teacher told you to do it, but because of the interesting stories you can find in the books, or the interesting new things you can learn from them!
If you take a good course, such as our Pre-IELTS and IELTS courses, you will both study in the class and also learn how to self-study effectively – you will have a teacher you can ask any question and get the help you need to start reading any kind of book in English at home.
Once you have a strong basic understanding of grammar, essay and paragraph structure and how to learn vocabulary properly, you can join our Reading & Writing SAT course and learn about context, literature and Reading and Writing SAT exam methods!
In my next post, I will show you an example of a Reading and Writing SAT question.
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