Читать книгу SAT For Dummies - Woods Geraldine, Geraldine Woods, Ron Woldoff - Страница 20

This is an opportunity for you to stand out among your high-school peers and represent with honors the country where you are a national! A high score on this exam is certainly within your reach, even if English is not your first language, if you know what to do and practice your skills.

For the SAT Reading Test, you may get stuck on some of the academic vocabulary. To work on this, as you practice SAT reading, underline and look up any word you don’t know. (More on this in Chapter 3, because every student gets stuck on this, even English-only speakers.) After a while, you’ll know enough of the words.

For the SAT Writing and Language Test, you have probably studied the mechanics of English more than your English-born counterparts, so you may have a better academic understanding of sentence structure and verb form than they do. I have observed many, many times in a class with both English-only and non-native English speakers, that after a refresher of the basics of this test, the non-native English speakers often do much better than the English-only speakers!

For the SAT Math Tests, the math doesn’t change from language to language, so if you can crack the basic language used to put forth the problem, you should do just fine. There may be some fine differences (for example, 2,345.67 in one language appears as 2.345,67 in another), but the basics are the same, and these differences are easy to master. Just be sure to practice using SAT materials.

Two things that you can do right now:

 First, start reading English books. Pick movies or novels that you love in your own language and read the English versions. You’ll be into the story, and you’ll know the gist of events well enough to pick up the English style of writing. Most importantly, you’ll learn the placement of grammar and the style of expressive writing.

 Next, see if there’s an SAT Subject Test that tests skills in your native language! This test should be easy for you, and you’ll score far better than your primary-English-speaking counterparts. Include your top-scoring Subject Test score with your application and show the schools how naturally strong you are in a topic (your native language) that so many others struggle with. At the time of this writing, the SAT offers Subject Tests in Spanish, French, Chinese, Italian, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and even Latin, where you could do well if you speak a number of Latin-based languages. The list changes, so check and see: https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat-subject-tests/subjects/languages. The College Board page even tells you, “Show your mastery of (this language).”