"Edward Hennessey" wrote in message
m...

"Ignoramus967" wrote in message
...
My 9 year old got his report card scores today. His percentile rank
is
at 99% in math, but only 92% in English.

I think that he can do better than than on English. I got 90% on
GMAT
verbal part, after just one year of living here, and he's lived in
the
US for 9 years, out of which he spoke English for 6 years.

My question is how do we improve his English, given his age of 9.
My
first thought is that he needs to just find something that he likes
to
read about and read a lot more. I think that simply reading good
books
(good as in, giving some examples of good use of the language) is
already a big help.

My second thought is maybe he just needs to find some fun club,
group,
discussion forum, theater, tutor or something like that that would
somehow make him more interested in learning English. He has a math
tutor who tries to keep him interested in math, maybe we can find
some
equivalent of that for English.

I never studied English formally, so I am not very experienced in
such
matters.

i


Libraries are, indeed, temples of knowledge. But it is nice for a
child to claim his own share of the
the good within them. Used books are cheap. Book-of -the-month clubs
must surely still exist where
a kid has the distinctive anticipation of getting a book just for
him, addressed just to him like a real
adult coming to the house on a marked date.


Another important point relevant to the above is his book is his.
Pride of possession
reinforces interest. You not only can't write in library books but
that is a particularly
distaseful crime. You can outline, make critical marginalia or
otherwise usefully
annotate your own books. They can be retrieved for study or enjoyment
at any time.
You can mark words and phrases that are particularly gifted...or that
require further thought or a trip to the thesaurus and dictionary.

For that matter, the
first books I would buy the boy would be a Roget's Thesaurus
(thumb-indexed and
conceptually organized) and an unabridged dictionary like Merriam
Webster's or
Random House. Your son might want to check an entry every time he
references it with
the understanding that if he sees a number of checks piling up by a
word or conceptual
cluster of antonyms or synonyms, that might signal memorization should
take an extended
look.

Regards,

Edward Hennessey