| Number of word families needed to: | |
| Get most things done as a tourist or visitor | 1,000 to 2,000 |
| Hold a friendly conversation | 6,000 |
| Watch television & movies | 3,000 minimum, preferably 6,000 |
| Read fluently (must know 98% of a text’s word families) | 3,000 minimum, preferably 6,000 |
Source:
What do you need to know to learn a foreign language? by Paul Nation
Vocabulary Size, Text Coverage and Word Lists by Paul Nation and Robert Waring
Useful article in the Washington Post re: standardized testing and fairness: No one likes the SAT. It’s still the fairest thing about admissions.
I’ll post some of the sections on income and scores in a bit, but this section on tutoring caught my eye:
Highly paid tutors make bold claims about how much they can raise SAT scores (“my students routinely improve their scores by more than 400 points”), but there is no peer-reviewed scientific evidence that coaching can reliably provide more than a modest boost — especially once simple practice effects and other expected improvements from retaking a test are accounted for. For the typical rich kid, a more realistic gain of 50 points would represent the difference between the average students at Syracuse and No. 197 University of Colorado at Boulder — significant, perhaps, but not dramatic.
By Jonathan Wai, Matt Brown and Christopher Chabris | 3/22/2019
Simple practice effects !
yeesh
Catherine & Katharine 