RW - Tips and Strategies Lesson

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Tips and Strategies Lesson

How will students know what Tier Two Words look like? Furthermore, since the vocabulary is integrated into the passage, how will students prepare for this portion of the SAT?

There are some important criteria for identifying Tier Two Words:

  • Importance and Utility: these words are used by mature readers and writers and are found in a variety of subject areas.
  • Instructional Potential: these words are used in a variety of ways so that students can make connections to other words and concepts.
  • Conceptual Understanding: the general concepts of these words need to be understood by students, but they provide additional specificity in describing the concept.

Examples of Tier Two Words

Profound

Occurrence

Absurd

Benevolent

Emerging

Intense

Skirmish

Utopian

Anomaly

Fortunate

Sinister

Ludicrous

It is amazing to see how much of your educational and personal experiences have played an important role in developing your vocabulary. Your writing, reading, and speaking experiences have helped you with this process.  

One of the best things students can do to help them learn words in context is to read daily. Students who read for pleasure typically do better on the SAT. If you don't like to read, try to at least read a website article every day.  Reading for only 20 minutes can help to increase fluency and comprehension, so make this a goal. Don't forget to read those literature assignments as well!  

In addition, if you want help with learning new words, try to create connections and associations that will help you remember the definition. For example, the word garrulous means excessively talkative. Think of someone you know who is really talkative. Then you can create an association such as this one: It is hilarious how garrulous Jenny is! Plus, hilarious and garrulous rhyme, so it will be easy to remember this word in the future.

You can also create memory tricks to help you with memorization. For example, abhor means to hate or extreme dislike. I hate doing abdominal exercises. Since I will remember disliking this activity, it will help me to remember what abhor means because abdominal and abhor have the same prefix. 

Lastly, there are always context clues within the text that will help you to figure out the meaning of the word. Look at the sentences around the word you are trying to figure out. Many times there are synonyms of the word or other clues that will help you to determine the meaning.  

For example, look at the following sentence:

Again it is true that the great majority of tragic heroes do possess hubris or a proud and passionate mind that seems to make the hero's downfall morally explicable.

Even if you have no idea what hubris means, the part of the sentence directly after the word tells you the definition. Hubris means to have excessive pride or self-confidence, so the words "proud" and "passionate mind" will lead you to figure out the true meaning of the word.

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