Teaching Vocabulary Effectively

     Today we had another jigsaw activity - each student reads one of five articles; people get in groups to discuss the article they read together, then everyone mixes up the groups to give the lowdown on the one they've become an "expert" on.  Summarizing effectively in the short time before people are tired of listening is good experience for all of us.

     Taking the readings overall, our goal is to answer the questions, "What does effective vocabulary instruction require?" and "Why is vocabulary instruction so important?"

     In answer to the second question, it is so important because, as statistics indicate, a student's literacy success at an early age is correlated with his or her future socioeconomic status.  From a more practical perspective, building vocabulary is necessary for learning in every subject as well as in the world outside the classroom.

     As for what vocabulary instruction requires, most of all it requires forethought and a plan, which should probably be better than doing it the way it was done to you back in the day.  The readings all agreed with the constructivist premise that learning only happens when students create meaning for themselves.  The readings also hinted at one of the constructivist corollaries: traditional teaching methods tend to fall far short of delivering the goods.  Students will create meaning, no doubt about that, but too many of them are inspired to create the meaning "skool sux" because they are set up to fail.

     Of course, we're not talking about the "independent" students, the ones who are self-effective and can learn by reading; we're talking about the "dependent" students who still need guidance and training about how to make sense of the strange and intimidating culture of school.

     Here's an idea from my experience: let's give students a list of words they've never heard of and will never hear again and then stick a dictionary in their faces and tell them to get to work copying?

     Fail!

     Okay, maybe that's not such a good plan.  Basically, this is what teachers do because it's what we were told to do as students.  Never mind that we hated copying definitions from the dictionary.  Not to mention the fact that it didn't do much to help us learn the words.

     According to the readings, here's what we could do instead:

     First off, make the students into partners.  You could allow them to take a long list of vocabulary terms and choose from them, for instance let the students select 8-10 terms out of 20.  Or you could brainstorm together about which words to include from a particular text.  The point is that the teacher needs to give students some ownership in the process.

     Next, teachers in all subjects should strive to identify the highest-priority words, the ones that students definitely need to know in order to succeed.  Lesson planning requires us to try to predict students' needs and gives us the opportunity to decide strategies for teaching in the most effective way possible.  In part this means not wasting time teaching what they already know.

     Another facet of effective vocabulary instruction, and another one requiring some amount of forethought and planning, is to teach across content areas, meaning to involve teachers in all subjects when planning what vocabulary to teach.

     The article I was most familiar with, "What's in a word" (Flanigan, Templeton, and Hayes), had some solid suggestions for teaching vocabulary effectively, some of which were echoed in the other readings.  The authors' primary initiative is helping students to develop their morphological awareness, that is their understanding of how words work and about how words are built.  Because so much of English is based on Greek and Latin, most of our words have meaning embedded within their components, the roots and affixes (suffixes and prefixes).  Decoding the meanings of these components, "unlocking the system of meaning," is close to impossible if you don't know there is any system to unlock.

     Teachers should therefore strive for "generative instruction," which is the name given to the authors' idea that students will generate knowledge by learning how to read the code.  Using graphic organizers and word trees, students explore the differences in meaning between words with similar features.  For instance the words graphic, polygraph, and telegraph all contain the root -graph-, which means something written out or represented visually; once you know the code, you can make an educated guess about any new word that contains the root.  Now you can discuss the suffix -ic, which creates an adjective; the prefix poly-, with many familiar examples available for discovery related to the coded meaning "many"; and the prefix tele- with many other examples related to the meaning "to send."  Those additional examples branch out to still more, and with any luck and probably a lot more practice, the students are expanding their vocabularies.

     One challenge for me personally is figuring out how to work more vocabulary study into the math classes I teach. It's time to mix up the curriculum - let's bring literacy instruction into math class and sneak some data analysis into reading class!



Articles discussed:
 Baumann, J. F., Ware, D., and Edwards, E. C.  (2007).  "Bumping into spicy, tasty words that catch your tongue": a formative experiment on vocabulary instruction.  The Reading Teacher, 61(2).  PDF.

Flanigan, K. and Greenwood, S. C.  Effective content vocabulary instruction in the middle: matching students, purposes, words, and strategies.  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 51(3).  Nov. 2007.  PDF.

Flanigan, K., Templeton, S., and Hayes, L.  (2012).  What's in a word? Using content vocabulary to generate growth in general academic vocabulary knowledge.  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 56(2). Oct. 2012.

Pikulski, J. J. and Chard, D. J.  (2005).  Fluency: bridge between decoding and reading comprehension.   The Reading Teacher, 58(6).  Mar. 2005.  PDF.

Ruddell, M. R. and Shearer, B. A.  (2002).  "Extraordinary," "tremendous," "exhilarating," "magnificent": middle school at-risk students become avid world learners with the Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy (VSS).  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 45(5).  Feb. 2002.