Vocabulary for Sutton SET

[garima.varma]

Sutton SETs doesn’t have Cloze as such, so wondering how strong the vocabulary needs to be for these exams? Is it worth learning tricky words or roots like Latin words etc? Will it only be a part of comprehension and hence not many question? If thats the case is it advisable to not spend much time on vocab and instead work on main comprehension skills like retrieval, inferences etc? Thank you

[hermanmunster]

I don't know specifically about these exams but suspect that vocabulary is at the root of everything - difficult to do comprehension if you don't know what the words mean.
I suspect those who are familiar with it will say that wide reading and checking words you don't know is crucial - we used to "word of the day"(not for 11 plus just generally) and try to get it into sensible sentences etc

[bridge]

Always found the vocab a bit strange to do as where do you start? which words do you use? My daughter was awful at vocab & spelling - in fact still is but she passed the Sutton & Tiffin exams. We took her to a tuition centre where they would give lists of words to revise - needless to say we didn't stay there for long. Her own opinion was that studying random words was not that useful as they would be soon forgotten - unless used regularly.

Read and learn words as you go along - write them in a dictionary. I'm not convinced of the rote words learning. I always felt it was a way the tuition industry pad out their courses.

[MARC1]

We did the vocab thing here also. DS went through loads of words to learn. At the end I asked DS about whether he used any of the various words we learnt and he said he used very very little if next to none of the words . But its just like a 'security blanket' where you naturally feel that the meanings and spellings of certain words are needed.

[garima.varma]

Many thanks for all the responses and honestly it makes me feel much better as DS struggles to remember the “word-only” words i.e. the ones that he tried to learned as part of “vocabulary” lists. The reason being, without frequent use of those in his writing and speaking, he just gets confused which word had which meaning, it mostly jumbled up and we reached a stage where we realized he could retain hardly 30% of the words he learned. Trying to unnecessarily add those word to his writing also didn’t look right as it took away the natural flow.

It had started to worry me as wherever I look for 11+ skills, Vocab comes on the top. However, when we actually do the practice papers, there are hardly 2-3 questions that are out right word-meaning based and that too under comprehension. Couldn’t find any separate section on Vocab, except for cloze but thats not in Sutton SET exam format atleast.

I may now only do the new words we come across in comprehension passages and books he reads and not worry much about just mugging-up lists of new word-meanings.

Thanks again.