GIUJOE, a member of our Message Forum, took the DLAB and scored a 146. He offers the following advice:
Contrary to popular belief, you can study for the DLAB. I took the information that About.com gave me, some books from the library, and one good night of studying and I pulled off a 146. The problem is that most native English speakers don't know and don't care much about English grammar. If you have a strong understanding of english grammar, how verbs work, how objects work, how adjectives and possessives work, you'll do fine.
You also need to be open to manipulating those rules. If I tell you that from now on, adjectives follow nouns, then it's not a 'blue dog' no matter how many times I say it, it's a 'dog blue.'
Another hard part for English speakers if finding stress in words. English usually has multiple stresses. Here's an easy tip to find stress. Remember in elementary school when you were studying syllables and the teacher had you knock on a desk for every syllable? Do that!
Let's do the word 'aptitude.' Say the word and knock on the desk. You should get three knocks: ap-ti-tude. Now, do it again and make the strength of your knock correspond to the strength of your voice. You'll find that the stress falls on the first syllable: AP-ti-tude. Do that on the test while the speaker speaks. If you're in a room with multiple people, don't do it on the desk just for politeness sake. Use your leg.
Fred, another individual who has taken the DLAB, offers the following advice:
DLAB is more than having a good understanding of the english language. It also helps if you can understand the dialic of other people. A good help is knowing letters pronounced in other languages. Even better is knowing other languages (Russian, German, Farsee, ect.)
Another point to learn before taking the test is that word order is a major factor. There will be parts of the test where they will say that there will be an ending for the noun(car(se)) and an ending for a adverb(yesterday(e)) but the noun has to come before the adverb and only in that order to be correct. The best way to come to the test is over prepaired and and relaxed.
