Learning Blog #5, Teaching Vocabulary, Chapter 7

First off, I think it is important to know that vocabulary is very important in all subject areas, vocabulary is terms often found among expository texts.  So, each subject will have its own vocabulary that student should know, not just for reading and writing.

Word knowledge is not as simple as it seems, the example of "John took a plane" was described by how it could have 3 or 4 different meanings, depending on how the person takes it, so knowing how to recognize a word and actually knowing what it means is something that comes with comprehension skills, and being able to use context clues to help them.

5 facets of word knowledge
Incrementally: levels of word knowledge develop over time
Polysemy: multiple meanings associated with a word
Multidimentionality: many different types of knowledge to be learned about a word
Interrelatedness: Connections are made between or among words
Heterogeneity: word type, purpose, and prior knowledge influence word knowledge required

Some ways to develop word knowledge are to learn basic oral vocal, learn to read known words, learn new words representing known and new concepts, clarifying and enriching meanings of known words, and moving words into students' expressive vocabularies.

Incidental Vocabulary Development: I use this with my special needs students and I love it!!!! It is a fun and natural way to teach students vocabulary, it occurs through conversation, word pal, reading, television, stories, or videos.  In this theory, words are labels for things, and in my classroom nearly EVERYTHING is labeled.  Throughout the year, we add labels as we go and as the students learn different objects.  Everyday we have a scavenger hunt where the students each get 5-10 words they have to find throughout the room, it is very fun and engaging for the students.

Word Inventories are usually found in the books my population of students read, and I get a baseline of what words the student can read, spell, and tell the meaning of, so that I can focus on using context clues and other strategies to improve the other words.  It is similar to the preconcept learning check in the preparation stage of PAR.

Graphic Organizers, these are pretty self explanatory, but I have noticed they are involved in every chapter and can be used for a variety of things.

Word Association Activity (Context Clue Discovery) is very important for all students to master.  For example, the word "tie" has several different meanings, so even if the student can read the word, if they do not know the meaning behind it they need help with context clues to tell which meaning it is using.  For my students, I use flashcards, example the word "bat" one card has a picture of the animal, and one of a baseball bat, and I say a sentence like "I fly at night" and have the student pick the correct card.  This helps me measure if the student knows multiple meanings of the word on a constant basis.

Discover the word's context
Isolate the prefix
Seperate the suffix
Say the stem or root word
Examine the stem or root word
Check with someone
Try the dictionary

This is a mnemonic used to model to help students with independent reading and word meaning.

I think using a dictionary is underused in schools these days, and for students to know how to correctly use a dictionary for spelling, meaning, synonyms, antonyms, and parts of speech would be beneficial for independent learning, instead of relying on the teacher.  The Dictionary Game is something I have never used, but seems very fun and like a great way to let students have fun while playing.  How you play is by picking a word like "amphibian" and each student in the group has to think of a word that "amphibian" would be in the definition of.

Students learn and grow intellectually when teachers spend a great deal of time teaching vocabulary and vocabulary strategies that students may use independently to help their own understanding.  Having a good understanding of words in a text is necessary for comprehension and fluency.  Although I did not mention all of the strategies, the ones I did mention is because they are ones that can universally be used with general ed and special ed students, but there are many great strategies I did not mention.  As I said before, teaching vocabulary is the starting point of EVERY subject, because you cannot teach new material without a solid background in vocabulary for any subject.