English as a Second Language and Reading Comp

Dkimvisionmaker11

Hi,
I moved to the US 10 years ago when I was 18, and I started speaking English only then. Unsurprisingly, Reading Comp is my weakest section. Anyone who speaks English as a second language but has experienced some success on the RC?

n.place

Well, I'm not an ESL speaker but I've got experience tutoring ESL students at the university level and I teach English.. do you know what you're having problems with the most? Is it timing, or a particular type of question? What did you major in in college? I've looked at the Spanish LSAT (as spanish is my second language) and its certainly hard!

studyingandrestudying

Also one who works with ESL students but isn't an ESL speaker, and I'd say maybe try reading some classic books and go on GoodReads for ideas.

lsat2016

@Dkimvisionmaker11 i took lsat several years ago but am an ESL. worse than your exposure to english as i moved to the US later than you. considering retake. i had a lot of trouble with RC, similar to you. speed was the main issue, not accuracy. was also an issue in LR.

i finally scored low 17x on official, but RC i couldn't improve much. got -6 because i had 5 mins for the last passage and didn't have time to read the last 4 questions.

Invisible

English is my second language and RC was my worst section for a very long time. I think it ultimately helped to just go through as many RC passages as possible to get used to the LSAT reading style. For especially difficult passages, I pause for 10 seconds to do a low resolution summary in my dominant language. I still frequently get author's attitude questions wrong because I have a hard time understanding the tone/attitude in English, but at the end of the day it helps to not rely on an overall "feeling" of the passage but rather find specific words that give clue to the author's opinion and mood. Hope this helps.

Hans Zimmer

I'll preface this by saying that I am not ESL, however, I have learned a second language later in life (around 18) and perhaps my experience improving my reading comprehension in that language can help.

I would recommend finding a good news site that has articles that interest you and forming a habit of reading at least a couple of articles every single day. I found that it was easy to incorporate this as a habit by reading an article with pretty much every meal I ate.

The reasoning is pretty simple; if you read a variety of articles you'll be exposed to new vocabulary and solidify not only your existing vocabulary but your understanding of grammatical structures as well. The LSAT throws around some technical terms that you could familiarize yourself with through this process.

Moreover, whenever I have the opportunity to listen to podcasts in my second language I take advantage of it. This could be while exercising, driving to work etc. I would attribute a significant improvement in my reading to listening to a variety of podcasts which, once again, exposed me to new vocabulary while solidifying my existing knowledge of the language.

Anyhow, I know this isn't a like for like comparison but I thought that it could be worthwhile to share my thoughts.

Goodluck!

Dkimvisionmaker11

@n.place
I think it's either timing or certain vocab or expressions that the test-writers assume that we all know. I majored in philosophy in college.

DINOSAUR

I'm also an ESL. Here are some advice:
1. I think LSAT sentences are not hard if you break them down piece by piece. If the sentence is long, try to digest them piece by piece rather than just read the full sentence at once and not understand anything.
2. Make sure you get the noun verb predicate for hard sentences. When you encounter something that you couldn't understand under time, break it down once and try to understand it in the context. If it doesn't work, let it go. You have to do this, otherwise your timing will suffer and you'll sacrifice other questions at the expense of the things that you just couldn't understand at that moment. If you happen to have time, you can go back and read again, but not now.
3. Figure out why you didn't understand something under time. When you encounter the same thing in the future, consciously say to yourself the meaning of the sentence. Like for me I had trouble with the word "other". In English it means the word after "other" is the same thing as the first thing mentioned. So every time I encounter "other" I just say to myself okay there is another same thing mentioned, where is that? Another example is adjectives. When you use adjective to describe something, it means there are other things that don't have that quality, otherwise you don't use that adjective. Like when I say this is a fresh apple, it means that there are apples that are not fresh. These two apples are different. If every apple is fresh, we don't say "fresh apple". It would be redundant.
I think for ESL we have to do this consciously. These things just come naturally for native speakers, but not for us.
4. If you encounter an expression that you don't understand, use the context to understand it. It wouldn't be any different. Use the idea of the paragraph or previous sentences to understand weird expressions.