It’s not a knock-knock joke, but it’s just about as predictable:
Q: “What do you call someone who speaks two languages?”
A: “Bilingual.”
Q: “What do you call someone who speaks many languages?”
A: “A polyglot.”
Q: “What do you call someone who speaks one language?”
A: “An American.”

The facts of the matter really are startling: Americans don’t learn foreign languages.

There is, of course, no small irony in the fact that a nation of immigrants should be such a language-learning basket-case. (At the same time, our immigrant roots doubtless account for some of our indifference to foreign tongues: after all, to come to America is to leave the Old World – and its languages – behind.)

But is this really such a bad thing? Thanks, in large measure, to American Hegemony – a circumstance accomplished because of (or is that in spite of?) pervasive mono-linguism – English has become the world’s lingua franca. Conversations between residents of different countries tend to be conducted in English – whether either of the interlocutors is a native English speaker or not. Given the investment of time and effort that learning a foreign language requires, a good argument can be made that our limited educational resources should not be wasted on developing ornamental skills, such as the ability to speak in French.

To be sure, there are the tea-leaf readers out there who are busy getting us ready for a new global order, in which Mandarin replaces English as the language of record.
Perhaps. It seems just  as likely, though, that even if China does overtake the US, English will continue on as the lingua franca, if only because it is easier. John McWhorter argues there is even an historical precedent for such a continued ascendancy.

Instinctively, we may feel that it’s a good thing to know more than one language. But is this just snobbery?

In deciding which to take, students may choose to weigh a number of their differences, and one in particular has captured our attention: the prevalence of vocabulary on the SAT.

The SAT is besotted with vocabulary—sentence completions, vocabulary-in-context questions, even certain idioms that creep into the grammar sections.  But what is the SAT testing? Putatively, the SAT is gauging college-readiness. From the horse’s mouth:

The SAT is a globally recognized college admission test that lets you show colleges what you know and how well you can apply that knowledge.

But is there more to it? Vocabulary has a very high correlation to intelligence as tested by IQ tests. Yet—ostensibly—the SAT is not an IQ test.

Like KFC, the letters SAT now designate nothing, but its middle initial used to stand for “Aptitude” (n.b., the “F” stood for “Fried”). The test was originally created to open prestigious universities to those without fancy boarding school backgrounds. The SAT’s creators envisioned a test that could measure “pure” intelligence, rather what had been gleaned in high school.

Today, many of the test’s critics note that those with access to better schools and better test prep still have an unfair advantage. Ironically, the SAT, despite all its egalitarian intentions, has become despised as an elitist tool. But what these critics have not paid as much attention to is the role that vocabulary plays in that advantage.

If a student does attend an exclusive prep school and has parents who are well read and use advanced vocabulary at home, that student will likely fare better on a vocabulary test. Vocabulary is all about exposure.  The most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary lists nearly 172,000 words in current use. Research published by Oxford Journals indicates that a new vocabulary word needs to be encountered at least ten times and used in speech or writing at least another ten times before it becomes a part of a person’s vocabulary.

These are not the numbers that a student cramming for the SAT wants to hear.

Knowing more words gives students a huge advantage on the SATs. Which makes a certain amount of sense: in order to be ready for college, a student should have a sophisticated grasp of the English language that will allow him or her to participate in scholarly discourse.

However, is leveraging the advantage of a voluminous vocabulary—largely acquired by osmosis—completely unfair? The College Board’s decision to eliminate analogies and antonyms from the test in 2005 seems to indicate that it saw a discrepancy in its testing aims and the knowledge demanded of test takers.

Of course, one could also argue that by forcing a student to inhabit a world of unfamiliar words on the test, the student is really being asked to navigate around certain unknowns—to eliminate wrong answers in a series of binary decisions. But—naturally—knowing those words in the first place certainly comes in handy.

The vocabulary advantage is underscored by the performances of adults who have retaken the SAT decades later: they may fall off in their math scores, but tend to score better in verbal. All our lives, we continue acquiring new vocabulary. This phenomenon held true for both the concerned mother of a teenage son who took the SAT and wrote about it for the Wall Street Journal and a writer for the sports blog Deadspin, who took the test as a sort of masochistic stunt with fewer physical risks than those documented by Jackass. (WARNING: this article contains words of the four-letter kind that are never found on the SAT—or the ACT.)

So, the message is simple: if you’re taking the SAT, study your vocabulary. Reading and writing are the best ways to practice (and help explain why those two particular adults’ scores went up: they are both professional writers). However, learning vocabulary for vocabulary’s sake cannot hurt, either. Besides, Cartesian coordinates come and go, but a good vocabulary will stay with you for life!

Helpful links:

Tips to remembering new words

Merriam-Webster Word of the Day

Online Flash Cards

Vocab Quizzes

“Why is the sky blue?”

Children will ask and parents will punt with a vague reference to atmospheric gasses, light waves, the visible spectrum of colors…

In a recent New York Times article, actor Alan Alda recalled that he could never wrap his head around his science teacher’s explanation of what a flame was:

At 11, Alan Alda was fascinated by the colorful, translucent undulations of a burning flame.
So he asked his teacher, “What is a flame?”
“It’s oxidation,” she said.
The answer dumbfounded him. A flame is indeed oxidation, a type of chemical reaction that occurs when something burns. But the word did not capture why a flame burns orange or why it produces heat, or anything else that the young Mr. Alda really wanted to know about it.
“It’s just giving it another name,” he said by telephone last week. “It’s like saying, ‘Well, a flame is Fred.’ And that really doesn’t get you anywhere.”

He has taken up the matter more broadly as an adult, spearheading an initiative to make scientific concepts easier to understand.

Perhaps it’s because science teachers love science to such an extent that they cannot understand why someone wouldn’t gravitate toward it naturally; maybe it’s because science can intimidate and confuse the casual visitor hopelessly with its jargon and alien units of measurement (Moles? Kilojoules?); or the culprit might be language itself—Joe and Jane Scientist were so busy learning science that they forgot to learn the language skills necessary to communicate it to a larger public and, instead, retreated to academia.

No matter what its cause, the problem is apparent: Americans do not understand most of the science they utilize in their daily lives. An ABC News story recently found only 16% of Americans can define the Internet and an only slightly higher number can explain what a molecule is.

Those numbers seem to indicate an occasion to step back a bit, look at the bigger picture, and create a teachable moment. At its most basic level, science is our attempt to understand the universe about us. UC Berkley has provided a website that lays out conceptual goals for teaching science to school children of all ages, beginning with the assertion that grade levels K-2 should understand that, “Science is both a body of knowledge and the process for building that knowledge.”

The National Center For Improving Science Education lays out nine scientific concepts that a student needs to learn, ranging from Organization to Diversity. Lastly, the National Science Education Standards recommends assessing classroom performance in such a way that emphasizes how the collection of data can enforce the understanding of basic scientific principles.

Of course, students—caught in the trenches, studying—don’t often have the luxury of the big picture. That said, online teachers’ tools can provide very helpful study aids, including the California State University curriculum for a course on the Methods of Teaching Science. Take a minute to click around if you need a fresh explanation of Stoichiometry, or a set of useful analogies and graphics to understand scientific concepts and conversions.

Finally, if you want to test your own scientific knowledge, the Pew Research Center has a 12-question online quiz, and Education.com has created a great scientific scavenger hunt for middle-schoolers. And, if you need a handy explanation of why the sky is blue, you can find one right here.

But, if all this leaves you cold, New York Times illustrator Christoph Niemann understands.