Vocabulary is
Intellectual Capital
What's with the push by some parents
to make sure their children know what we used to call "two-bit words," meaning,
"big" ones? What's the big deal about a vocabulary? Why take time away from TV,
sports and hanging out with friends to read books with complex language,
stories and themes?
Well, think of it this way: a big
vocabulary is to your future as money is to a capitalist. It's the framework
and the fuel for making dreams come true.
According to education leader E.D.
Hirsch, founder of the Core Knowledge series of quality curriculum (www.coreknowledge.org), a big
vocabulary is biggest and best boost to a high score on a college admissions
test.
The SAT, for example, is based on a
working vocabulary of 60,000 to 100,000 words. You can have that if you add
about 15 new words a day to your vocabulary from ages 2 to 17. But by
definition, schoolbooks are written at or below your grade level. They don't
introduce you to too many new words in a school year. The novels selected for
most school curricula are far from the classics, at least until high school,
and even then, sometimes only the honors classes get to read the "big" books.
Why is this? Because so many students
lack sufficient vocabulary to handle the "big" books. And that's because their
parents didn't keep them reading past a basic level of competence.
The answer is that you need to be
immersed in the world of language and knowledge - reading a lot of books outside
of school.
Rich, well-educated parents know
this, and make sure their children have a lot of books in their home, go to the
library a lot, and always have a book in their backpacks to handle "down time"
when it comes up. Books expose students to more words than they could ever hope
to hear in class or read in textbooks, not to mention words of higher quality
and complexity from a wider range of fields. Books also are designed to create
hope, curiosity, confidence and other positives in the reader. That isn't
always the case with textbooks, which often descend into politicization,
provocation, emotion and triviality.
Now, THERE are some two-bit words
that your child ought to know!
By Susan Darst Williams • www.GoBigEd.com • Read to Me 015 • © 2006
