Teaching and Learning Vocabulary

Bringing Research to Practice

Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Michael L. Kamil, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Michael L. Kamil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135605445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Although proficiency in vocabulary has long been recognized as basic to reading proficiency, there has been a paucity of research on vocabulary teaching and learning over the last two decades. Recognizing this, the U.S. Department of Education recently sponsored a Focus on Vocabulary conference that attracted the best-known and most active researchers in the vocabulary field. This book is the outgrowth of that conference. It presents scientific evidence from leading research programs that address persistent issues regarding the role of vocabulary in text comprehension. Part I examines how vocabulary is learned; Part II presents instructional interventions that enhance vocabulary; and Part III looks at which words to choose for vocabulary instruction. Other key features of this timely new book include:
* Broad Coverage. The book addresses the full range of students populating current classrooms--young children, English Language Learners, and young adolescents.
* Issues Focus. By focusing on persistent issues from the perspective of critical school populations, this volume provides a rich, scientific foundation for effective vocabulary instruction and policy.
* Author Expertise. Few volumes can boast of a more luminous cast of contributing authors (see table of contents).This book is suitable for anyone (graduate students, in-service reading specialists and curriculum directors, college faculty, and researchers) who deals with vocabulary learning and instruction as a vital component of reading proficiency.

Chapter 1

Teaching and Learning Vocabulary

Perspectives and Persistent Issues

Michael L.Kamil
Stanford University

Elfrieda H.Hiebert
University of California, Berkeley

This book addresses the role of vocabulary in reading text. The role of vocabulary and reading is a complex one, as reading researchers have long recognized. In 1925, Whipple described the central role of vocabulary thus: “Growth in reading power means, therefore, continuous enriching and enlarging of the reading vocabulary and increasing clarity of discrimination in appreciation of word values” (p.). In 1942, Davis described comprehension as comprised of two skills: word knowledge, or vocabulary, and reasoning.

Words represent complex and, often, multiple meanings. Furthermore, these complex, multiple meanings of words need to be understood in the context of other words in the sentences and paragraphs of texts. Not only are students expected to understand words in texts, but also texts can be expected to introduce them to many new words. The vocabulary of written language is much more extensive and diverse than the vocabulary of oral language (Hayes, Wolfer, & Wolfe, 1996).

One way of illustrating some of the challenges that readers can have with vocabulary is to provide a real-life example from instructional materials. The following words illustrate approximately four or five of every 100 words in the first-grade anthologies of the reading programs that are approved for purchase with state funds in Texas (Texas Education Agency, 1997):

scritch, spittlebug, steeple (Adams et al., 2000)

snowcones, sneezed, spooky (Afflerbach et al., 2000))

saleslady, steered, stump (Farr et al., 2001)

shuns, scampered, sopping (Flood et al., 2001)

scatting, skiddle, succulents (Scholastic, 2000)

These words demonstrate the diversity of vocabulary in a reading program even at the end of Grade 1. Based on the frequency of words within a corpus of 17.25 million words taken from representative kindergarten through college texts (Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995), each of the words just listed had a frequency of less than three occurrences within a million words of running text. Indeed, most are likely to appear fewer than once in a million words of text. Some of the words such as sneezed, spooky, saleslady, steered, and stump are likely easy for students to understand once they decode or hear the word pronounced because most children have heard or even spoken these words in conversation. Other words such as shuns, scatting (used in this particular text to describe a form of jazz singing), and scritch are ones that even high-school students do not know (Dale & O’Rourke, 1981).

The types of vocabulary in texts that are used for instruction is but one of the many problems that need to be addressed in vocabulary research and instruction. Our task, in this introductory chapter, is foreshadowing the themes that run throughout the book. In so doing, the chapter begins by outlining a perspective on vocabulary learning, especially as it relates to the reading of text. The second section of the chapter develops a perspective on vocabulary teaching as it pertains to reading text. The final section of the chapter presents several persistent issues in the teaching and learning of vocabulary—issues that, if not the direct focus of every chapter in this volume, underlie much of the work of contributors to this volume.

A PERSPECTIVE ON VOCABULARY LEARNING

The National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) identified the components of reading as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. As the content of the chapters in this book illustrates, vocabulary holds a special place among these components. Vocabulary is not a developmental skill or one that can ever be seen as fully mastered. The expansion and elaboration of vocabularies is something that extends across a lifetime.

A first consideration in delineating the construct of “vocabulary” in research and practice is that individuals have various types of vocabulary that they use for different purposes. Failure to distinguish among the different kinds of vocabulary can lead to confusion and disagreement about both research findings and instructional implications. Generically, vocabulary is the knowledge of meanings of words. What complicates this definition is the fact that words come in at least two forms: oral and print. Knowledge of words also comes in at least two forms, receptive—that which we can understand or recognize—and productive—the vocabulary we use when we write or speak.

Oral vocabulary is the set of words for which we know the meanings when we speak or read orally. Print vocabulary consists of those words for which the meaning is known when we write or read silently. These are important distinctions because the set of words that beginning readers know are mainly oral representations. As they learn to read, print vocabulary comes to play an increasingly larger role in literacy than does the oral vocabulary.

Productive vocabulary is the set of words that an individual can use when writing or speaking. They are words that are well-known, familiar, and used frequently. Conversely, receptive, or recognition, vocabulary is that set of words for which an individual can assign meanings when listening or reading. These are words that are often less well known to students and less frequent in use. Individuals may be able assign some sort of meaning to them, even though they may not know the full subtleties of the distinction. Typically, these are also words that individuals do not use spontaneously. However, when individuals encounter these words, they recognize them, even if imperfectly.

In general, recognition or receptive vocabulary is larger than production vocabulary. And, as noted earlier, for beginning readers, oral vocabulary far outstrips print vocabulary. This is one of the determining factors in shaping beginning reading instruction. Beginning reading instruction is typically accomplished by teaching children a set of rules to decode printed words to speech. If the words are present in the child’s oral vocabulary, comprehension should occur as the child decodes and monitors the oral representations. However, if the print vocabulary is more complex than the child’s oral vocabulary, comprehension will not occur. That is, the process of decoding a word to speech does nothing more than change its representation from visual print to oral speech. If it is not in the child’s vocabulary, it is simply an unusual collection of speech sounds. The details of this “theory” of vocabulary and reading instruction can be summarized in the following way: Comprehension is a function of oral language and word recognition. That is, comprehension of print is a result of the ability to decode and recognize words and oral language knowledge. There are two intermediate steps, though. The first is the link between decoding and oral language.

Decoding to Oral Language

Decoding words to speech requires a background of oral language ability and the knowledge of letter-to-sound correspondences. A reader must translate the print on a page into speech. Once a reader decodes a word, oral language plays the predominant part in comprehension. In fact, Sticht, Beck, Hauke, Kleiman, and James (1974) showed that for younger readers, up to about Grade 3, reading comprehension and oral language comprehension were roughly interchangeable. This relationship implies that the texts that children are given in early reading instruction must be closely tied to their oral language abilities. The vocabulary that young readers are asked to decode cannot be far more complex than that of their oral language. Thus, words such as shuns or scatting from the Texas- adopted texts cited earlier in this chapter may be decoded eventually but may well be treated as nonsense words by many first graders. Historically—although not currently the pattern in the textbook anthologies, as the previous examples show—beginning readers have been given texts where most of the vocabulary is limited to those words within their oral language. That way, children can devote their attention to the decoding of words that, once figured out, relate to familiar experiences.

The second intermediate step is that oral language ability should lead to oral comprehension. Students need to understand that what they decode should make as much sense as something they would say. This relationship assumes that a host of other factors do not complicate the picture. For example, nonnative speakers of English may not automatically make use of the decoded representations, even if they produce accurate oral representations. For native speakers, the syntactic complexity or the discourse might be complications that prevent comprehension from occurring even after appropriate decoding has taken place.

The foregoing suggests that vocabulary occupies a central place in the scheme of learning to read. Vocabulary serves as the bridge between the wordlevel processes of phonics and the cognitive processes of comprehension. Once students have become proficient at the decoding task, however, a shift occurs in the vocabulary of text. Texts now become the context for encountering vocabulary that is not within one’s oral vocabulary. A preponderance of common and familiar words continues to occur in texts, as running discourse depends on a core group of words. In the Zeno et al. (1995) analysis of 17.25 million words that represented texts used in schools from kindergarten through college, 5,580 words accounted for 80% of the total words (and approximately 90% of the total words in Grades 3 to 9 texts; Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971). However, the number of types or unique words that accounted for the other 20% of total words was enormous: 150,000.

These rare words are much more likely to occur in the vocabularies of text than in oral vocabularies. Hayes and his colleagues (Hayes & Ahrens, 1988; Hayes et al., 1996) have considered the commonality and rareness of words in oral and written language. Table 3.1 of Cunningham’s chapter in this book presents the data on the numbers of rare words in different kinds of texts ranging from scientific articles to concept books for preschoolers and oral language corpora ranging from television programs to conversations. Common words were defined as those among the 10,000 most common (rather than the words that Zeno et al. [1995] identified as occurring 10 times or more per million-word written corpus). These researchers conclude that speech typically contains far fewer rare words than written language. Even the texts that are considered children’s books or literature have more rare words than all oral discourse except for the testimony of expert witnesses.

Presumably, students who are automatic readers recognize the majority of words that are common (i.e., most of the 5,580 most frequent words). The contexts that are provided in paragraphs and sentences can then be used to understand words that occur less frequently but that are critical to the meaning of the discourse. When the number of known words is not sufficient to figure out the meaning of unknown words, comprehension breaks down. Such a scenario can happen with highly proficient readers when they read in highly technical areas for which they may have insufficient background knowledge. Consider the following excerpt:

If modern techniques such as “optical proximity correction” are applied to compensate for the blurring effects of diffraction, photolithography can create features smaller than the wavelength of light used in projecting the pattern. In this example of optical proximity correction, a complicated pattern used for the mask results in crisp features on the chip. (Hutcheson, 2004, p. 80)

For many readers of this chapter, attending to words that are rare in their written lexicon (i.e., diffraction, photolithography), as well as attending to words with which they are familiar but that appear in a phrase that describes an unfamiliar process (e.g., optical proximity correction), may cause so much attention that overall meaning is compromised.

Once students reach the point where words that are not part of their oral vocabularies become prominent in school texts, numerous issues in the design and/or selection of texts and of instructional activities arise. Hiebert’s (chapter 12, this volume) analyses show that, within the typical 1,560-word, fourth-grade text in a reading/language arts program, approximately 4.3 words per every 100 are rare. It is unlikely that all rare words can be taught or even that they should be taught (to ensure that students acquire appropriate context strategies). Texts can thus be seen as both providing opportunities for developing richer vocabularies as well as placing high demands on the vocabulary learning strategies and existing vocabularies of students.

PERSPECTIVES ON VOCABULARY TEACHING

A clear perspective on vocabulary learning is useful. But without a similarly clear perspective on meaningful instruction, students’ learning in school will not be optimal. Fortunately for educators, a clear perspective on the components of effective vocabulary instruction is available in the report of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000). The Congressional mandate to the National Reading Panel was to “assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read” (p.). Whereas other researchers have considered aspects of vocabulary teaching (e.g., Kuhn & Stahl, 1998; Swanborn & de Glopper, 1999), the review of the National Reading Panel was a comprehensive analysis of experimental studies that have examined vocabulary instruction.

Using the definitions of Davis (1942) and Whipple (1925), where vocabulary is seen to be an integral part of comprehension, the National Reading Panel defined vocabulary as one of two aspects of comprehension instruction, the other being comprehension strategy instruction. By identifying vocabulary as one of five major components of reading, the National Reading Panel has directed attention to vocabulary instruction. Although some of the research base may not be as extensive or as robust as would be hoped, the report of the National Reading Panel has brought vocabulary into the foreground after a period when little attention was given to vocabulary instruction in classrooms (Scott, Jamieson-Noel, & Asselin, 2003) or in research programs (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002).

Findings of the National Reading Panel

In their synthesis of instructional research on vocabulary, the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) identified 50 studies that met their quality requirements. These 50 studies included a total of 73 samples of students. Of that total, 53 samples (or 73%) were students in Grades 3 to 8. This is not to say that vocabulary instruction is not critical with preschoolers through second graders. In fact, research shows that the vocabularies of preschoolers predict later reading achievement (Hart & Risley, 1995). However, the volume of published studies that met the requirements of the National Reading Panel was simply not sufficient to make substantive conclusions about early levels. Projects such as that of Schwanenflugel et al. (chapter 8, this volume) show what is needed and possible in the design and synthesis of vocabulary programs with preschoolers.

The concluding statement of the National Reading Panel’s (NICHD, 2000) synthesis of vocabulary research provides a succinct summary of classrooms where students’ vocabularies expand and are elaborated: “Dependence on a single vocabulary instruction method will not result in optimal learning” (p.). This conclusion is understandable in light of the complexity of what it means to know a word (Beck & McKeown, 1991; Nagy & Scott, 2000). This conclusion also means that educators need to design classrooms experiences that are multi-faceted, if students are to acquire new words and increase the depth of their word knowledge. The design of these environments does not come about, however, by happenstance. The National Reading Panel identified eight specific findings that can provide a scientifically based foundation for the design of rich, multifaceted vocabulary instruction. These conclusions of the National Reading Panel are summarized in Table 1.1.

TABLE 1.1 Summary of the National Reading Panel’s Specific Conclusions about Vocabulary Instruction

As the Panel’s conclusions indicate, a critical feature of effective classrooms is the instruction of specific words. This instruction includes lessons and activities where students apply their vocabulary knowledge and strategies to reading and writing. Discussions are held where teachers and students talk about words, their features, and strategies for understanding unfamiliar words.

Often it has been assumed that the vocabulary of students is too large to be affected by the small number of words that can be taught directly. The research emphatically demonstrates that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Teaching and Learning Vocabulary
• Part I: PERSPECTIVES ON HOW VOCABULARY IS LEARNED
• PART II: INSTRUCTIONS AND INTERVENTIONS THAT ENHANCE VOCABULARY
• PART III: PERSPECTIVES ON WHICH WORDS TO CHOOSE FOR INSTRUCTION