English Reading and Writing
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- Last Updated: Wednesday, 09 September 2020 21:56
- Published: Friday, 04 September 2020 15:53
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Since English Reading and Writing Comprehensive skills are considered an essential part of US education system, I've added this section to help with that.
From early on, Reading and Writing is encouraged in USA. With new hi tech gadgets, writing is on the decline, and you can see that writing tests are slowly getting omitted from many regular tests. This is really sad, as Reading and Writing are 2 skills that go hand in hand. If you are not able to write a word, you will have to work harder to remember the spelling of that word. Also, writing on a piece of paper with a pencil allows you to make a mental image of your writing. Writing tests have become more like reading tests, where the standardized tests now ask you to figure out if something is written in a correct way or not, instead of you writing it.
Vocabulary: An essential part of reading is to have a good vocabulary. As a kid, we start with very few words (may be 100 or so), but very quickly move on to 1000's of words.
Webster mentions that there are about 1M English words. However, it's complicated to count total words in any language.
- First the reason is that any language is always expanding, so new words are always getting formed.
- Secondly, one language gets influenced by other language, and some words from other language start getting used in our language which becomes a gray line.
- Thirdly, various forms of same word exist, as drive, drove, drives, etc, OR one word with multiple different meanings exist, which may be counted as separate words or as 1 word, depending on one's taste.
There is a very a good article here on how many words different languages have and how many do you need to learn: https://www.lingholic.com/how-many-words-do-i-need-to-know/
As per above article, English has 171,476 words in current use, 47,156 obsolete words and 615,100 definitions. You will find the reference of 100K word families in English language mentioned elsewhere too. A native English speaking person knows between 10,000 (uneducated) to 20,000 (educated) word families.
In part 2 of the series, the author says that the average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is of around 20,000 words, with a passive one of around 40,000 words. Active vocabulary is one that you use, while passive vocabulary is one that you recognize but don't use. Further he states that the first 25 words are used in 33% of everyday writing, the first 100 words appear in 50% of adult and student writing, and the first 1,000 words are used in 89% of every day writing! Of course, as we progressively move to a higher percentage, the number of words starts to dramatically increase (especially after 95% of comprehension), but it has been said that a vocabulary of just 3000 words provides coverage for around 95% of common texts (such as news items, blogs, etc.). We want to know these 10K-20K words from active vocabulary, that are used in spoken and written English, though not commonly.
If you learn even 1 new word a day, you will learn about 3K new words in a span of 10 years. I remember when I prepared for my GRE, I had this GRE prep book that had 3K words. I was told by experts that if I learnt these 3K words, I would be able to answer all vocabulary questions. I was surprised, since English language had so many more words, so how would just knowing 3K more words help. Now I know, how extra 3K words can add so much to your vocabulary !!
CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) is a description of the language abilities of students at different levels of learning. A is lower level, B is intermediate level, while C is advanced level.
- A1/A2 level: It's beginners level. At A2 level, you have a vocabulary of about 1500 words. It takes about 200 hours of studying english to reach this level. You can talk with english speakers and read simple texts at this level.
- B1/B2 level. It's intermediate level. At B2 level, you have a vocabulary of about 4000 words. It takes about 600 hours of studying english to reach this level. You can talk fluently with other English speakers on any complex topic. You can live and work in any english speaking country. You have confidence and control when speaking, writing, and reading.
- C1/C2 level: It's advanced level. At C1 level, you have a vocabulary of about 8000 words. It takes about 800 hours of studying english to reach this level. C2 is the mastery level, and you have a vocabulary of about 16000 words at this level. you talk, read and write just as a native speaker of the language.
This is just the start, where you start having mastery similar to native speaker of the language. This is where we want our vocabulary to be. To have your vocabulary at a level where you can read newspapers, magazines, etc without trying to guess meanings of words, you need to be at C2 level These are the words that are not that common in day to day speech, but used frequently in media papers, journals, etc
As an example, vocabulary.com lists these 100 words that are expected of a high school Freshman (basically 9th grade sudent) to know.
https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/79298
or high school vocabulary test here:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/angelospagnolo/can-you-pass-this-high-school-vocab-quiz
If you know all the words above, then you have vocabulary at C2 level. We want to get to a level of English speaking high school graduate.
I've a section titled "Word of the Day" that will aid us in our vocabulary quest.
http://maaldaar.com/index.php/word-of-the-day
Reading:
We need to develop our comprehending and reading skill This comes with reading a lot of different kinds of subjects.
One good starting point is some good articles here:
https://linguapress.com/advanced.htm