Use your words!
Vocabulary is an important factor in children’s school success, but it is not what most people think. A wide vocabulary usually is developed from parenting situations where a wide vocabulary is present where words and their use is important and both playful and serious. Furthermore, the parents of children with a wide vocabulary usually came from family cultures where words are valued and teach their children the importance of words through their use in conversations and language play. They can do things with words, performing oral tasks and comprehending a wide range of interpersonal situations even when young. These children participate in a rich culture that is both oral and literate; they come to school with tremendous cultural capital. They have an advantage over children not coming from this culture.
When vocabulary instruction is mentioned, most adults think of word lists, tedious and time-consuming dictionary activities, homework, and weekly tests. They also often claim not to remember many of the words on the lists, although a Freudian analysis would suggest that all those encounters with words are there in memory permanently encoded, perhaps scarred over because of the Dark Side of Education.
Why are existing lists of words not useful in teaching and learning vocabulary? Why are spelling and vocabulary books not useful in teaching and learning vocabulary? Why are weekly spelling/vocabulary test ineffective in getting students to become vocabulary learners? Why is having children who perform below 6th-grade independent reading level use dictionaries as the sole source/method for vocabulary learning? How can the method of having students write sentences with the words be made effective? Why is having 8-10 “new” vocabulary words for a whole class ineffective in producing students who build their vocabularies constantly? Why is memorizing the definitions of words not effective in building vocabulary learners? – I hope you get the gist here without answers of each of these questions from me. The good teacher has children using new words after building the concepts rather than using wordlists and tests. The good teacher uses and has the children using many new words in many difference contexts every day. The children see the words posted in their classrooms. They see the words in the things that they read. They use the words in their oral conversations. They use the words in their written work. For course one important implication about good teaching must be mentioned: every day in the good teacher’s classroom the children are talking, writing, and reading. The children are constantly performing with the vocabulary rather than taking a test every Thursday on the meanings and spellings.
Using the dictionary is a sophisticated skill that teachers should demonstrate at every grade level, and today using online tools like dictionary.com and visualthesaurus.com are mandatory. But the functional use of the abstract definitions in dictionaries usually doesn’t work very well until children read on about the sixth grade level. Why? Because the nature of the thinking that is needed to use these abstract definitions occurs when children are in transition to formal operations (Piaget!), and children still need to talk about the words, see the need for them, play with them, collect them, post them, and use them in a variety of ways to develop meanings. Doing things with words leads to more learning of vocabulary than taking tests, but this is a complex classroom structure not understood by the Dark Side.
So there are many thought experiments that the good teacher needs to consider: How do we teach vocabulary so that children learn the meaning of the words, their usage in context, the interpretation of meaning within specific contexts, and relationships of new words to their various word forms (morphology, i.e., inflections, added prefixes and suffixes, combining in various ways)? Why do most kindergarten through second-grader NOT learn new vocabulary in classrooms? (They do learn new words at school, just not from teachers in classrooms during vocabulary instruction.) How do children learn words? Why do children learn words? What is the purpose of learning new words? Why isn’t it enough to just read the word correctly (in a list or in context)?
An exercise: Develop a computation on how to close the gap between first graders who come to school with 1 million words in their speaking vocabulary and first graders who come to school with 10,000 words in their speaking vocabulary. Make some explicit assumptions about acquisition, leaching and learning vocabulary. How long does it take for teachers this fill this gap between the high and low performing children in vocabulary (and of course that’s only one of the gap issues)? How many words can a teacher explicitly teach in a day? How many words can a teacher explicitly review in a day? What are some strategies to get children to become vocabulary learners and models for each other?
But the problem is greater that just vocabulary. Consider this situation: A teacher gives a child a passage to read. She read all the words orally with 97% accuracy, but she is not able to demonstrate comprehension of what she reads when the teacher asks questions or for a retelling. There is a disconnect between her being able to pronounce the words and her being able to understand the words. Three issues might be involved here.
1) Since attention is limited, she might be focusing all her attention on the words and not the interconnections that are necessary for comprehension. This usually requires work on fluency and different foci for repeated readings. With students reading hard instructional texts, the teacher could try the following:
a. 1st reading is oral and focused on just saying the words, which some call a mumble reading;
b. 2nd reading is silent and focused on meaning and comprehension of the big ideas, sometimes with guiding questions or self-questioning;
c. 3rd reading is oral and focused on reading with expression to a partner.
d. More readings need to be varied for different purposes, and these need to be tailored to the individual reader.
2) She might not have wide enough background knowledge to comprehend the content of what she reads. This problem requires intensive vocabulary and concept development, usually with real experiences in observation and talk about the things being observed.
3) She is paralyzed by the threat of answering the questions of the teacher. This problem requires the use of alternative settings for the demonstration of comprehension that do not bring about paralyzing stress, or the child might not understand the words of the questions and need instruction on how to answer.
Very often the only way to make sure that the child is doing the repeated reading in a group is to have them reading orally (this is called Choral Reading), and the teacher listening and watching what is going on. Of course, like everything else, children have to be trained to participate effectively. Some children will lag behind the group or pretend to mouth the words, so the teacher has to move around and listen, then diagnose any issues like the difficulty of the passage or specific vocabulary problems. The issue with asking questions is that the child might answer but not understand. Much of vocabulary practice occurs covertly when the child is reading books, stories, newspapers, magazines, comic books, literature, nonfiction, listening to songs, and poetry rather than during explicit instruction and testing activities. Children who know words and how to use them have power, provided the words are embedded in concepts and situations that the children participate in.
Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog
GTIrbs.blogspot.com
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