Vocabulary Instruction Ideas to ponder

What we already know A little bit of data

Before they come to us  45 million - Number of words a 4- year old has heard if he/she comes from a home with a rich literacy environment.  13 million - Number of words a 4- year old has heard if not from a rich literacy environment.

Vocabulary muscle  17 for every 1,000 In adult to adult conversations, adults will use 17 rare words for every 1,000 words they say.  11 for every 1,000 In adult to child conversations (rare word knowledge helps SAT )

Rare words on TV  22 for every 1,000 = # of rare words on the Travel Channel, History Channel, PBS and Biography Channel  3 for every 1,000 = # of rare words on prime time network television

Rare words in print  30 for every 1,000 = # of rare words in children's books  53 for every 1,000 = # of rare words in comic books  128 for every 1,000 = # of rare words in expository books, chemistry texts, physics, etc.

Matthew Effect (from the Bible - Book of Matthew: “the rich shall get richer and the poor, poorer”) = For students in poor literacy environments, the achievement gap gets larger over time.

“Getting” a word  Students reading at grade level need to see a new word 10 times before they know it (hear it, see it, read it, play with it, write it)  If students are reading below grade level, they need to see a new word 40 times before they know it. -- Kylene Beers

NAEP results for 4 th & 8 th grade - correlated with amount of time spent reading scoreaverage minutes/day reading#words see/year 90 percentile40.4 minutes/day2,357, percentile12.9 minutes/day601, percentile 1.6 minutes/day 51,000 (students in 10 th percentile may see 51,000 words per year, but they still need to see the word 40x before it gets it into their automatic memory)

Solution #1 Reading is Fundamental Reading is the most important way to build one’s vocabulary

 Reading aloud is the “single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading (Anderson, 1985)  There is a strong relationship between vocabulary & reading comprehension  Vocabulary knowledge is related to students’ reading achievement (Francis & Simpson, 2003)

Reading and Vocabulary  Primary grades learn approximately 3,000 new words/year. If students do a modest amount of reading (3,000 words/day), they will encounter 10,000 different words in a year.  % of a student’s annual vocabulary growth can be attributed to incidental learning from context while reading.

Vocabulary Acquisition: Implications for Struggling Learners  Students need extensive reading instruction  Students need direct instruction in word- learning strategies  Students need a strong, systematic educational support to become successful independent word learners

Good Intentions that May Cause Harm

The Old Way  20 words per week given on Monday  Look up words in dictionary  Write a sentence  Test on Friday  Never see the words again

What’s Wrong With the Old Way?  These traditional practices do not increase students’ speaking, reading, and writing language. (Allen, 1999).

Looking it up in the dictionary  Looking up definitions leads to only a superficial understanding and rapid forgetting of words (McKeown, 1993)  Most entries are so isolated from context that students were unable to use the definition in a productive manner (Nist & Olejnik, 1995)  Dictionary definitions are not always complete enough to help students comprehend  Students must know a word in order to understand the definition or choose the best definition for the particular context (Miller & Gildea, 1987)

Candle  “A solid, usually cylindrical mass of tallow, wax, or other fatty substance with an axially embedded wick that is burned to provide light.” (American Heritage, 2000).

Nonsensical sentences  “My parents like to erode a lot.”  “Erode” meaning eat out (from the root e-, ex- = out + rodere = gnaw)  “The priest was piety.”  If students don’t know their grammar, then they don’t know how to use the different forms of the word in their sentences.

Context Clues  Teaching vocabulary through context clues is ineffective, especially for struggling readers.  Clues are subtle, challenging readers to infer in order to define unknown words.  The polysemous nature of words are hard to grasp from one context.

What I have learned Students in the lower stanines need to be given a variety of vocabulary strategies

Opportunities should be provided to allow students with differing learning styles to play with words in order to raise their word confidence.

Although the researchers agreed on what wasn’t working, they also agreed that there is no one solution for effective vocabulary instruction, however, there needs to BE specific vocabulary instruction, especially for struggling readers.

Solutions varied from single strategies like matching games to complex-wide, systematic revamping of curriculum to include cooperative learning groups, high-interest textbooks and training of all content-area teachers in several key activities for vocabulary acquisition and content- specific reading strategies.

Next Step: Solution #2 The K-12 Vocabulary Plan