Learn effective strategies that you can pass along to the students you tutor. Test taking skills can go a long way in helping a student succeed on the SAT verbal or any other SAT section. Students should understand that picking answers they know aren't correct is a great way to narrow down the right answer. Likewise they should understand that some questions increase in difficulty as the test progresses.
Encourage your students to read extensively. The best way to build vocabulary over the long term is to read and absorb words that way. However, if time is short, help the student learn additional vocabulary with an SAT workbook or flash cards.
Tailor instruction to the two types of test questions. You can help your students do better on sentence completion by helping them get a general sense of the sentence before choosing answers. Passage-based reading questions should be read before the passage itself to prepare the student for the types of information to watch for.
Teach your students to work steadily through all sections and skip the questions that present a major problem. While students should not skip from sentence to sentence or passage to passage, they should give each question an honest effort while skipping those questions that begin to cost them too much time. They can come back to those questions when they finish the others.
Encourage your student and help keep perspective realistic. Some students have a tendency to over think the SAT and put too much emphasis on its importance to their college career. Similarly, some students put so little emphasis on it that they goof off. Try to keep your students somewhere in the middle with wise words and guidance.
Provide SAT tutorial software and sample questions to your students so they can practice. Understanding test structure and take a few dry runs can help students feel secure and prepared.