Vocabulary Strategies That Work

Do This—Not That!

Lori G. Wilfong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000363333
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement des langues

Update your vocabulary practices to meet standards and improve students' word knowledge! This revised, clearly structured guide shows you how. Each chapter is packed with engaging, research-based, classroom-ready strategies for teaching vocabulary. For each vocabulary recommendation, you'll learn the research behind it, how it relates to the Common Core and other state standards, and how to implement it in your classroom.

This expanded second edition includes a wealth of new vocabulary-building strategies and activities. Updates include a new chapter offering a research perspective, more content on teacher and student selection of vocabulary, and new tools and examples for content-area teachers to incorporate meaningful vocabulary instruction. Additional Support Material, with free printable activities and tools, is available online at www.routledge.com/9780367480592. This book is an invaluable resource for practicing and pre-service teachers.

Chapter 1

Five Things Every Educator Should Know About Vocabulary Acquisition and Instruction

“Let’s make a list,” I announce to the educators in front of me. “What are all the things that might affect your students’ vocabularies?” Answers were shouted from around the room: “Travel!” “Socio-economic status.” “Parent education.” “Experiences outside of school.” “Amount of time spent reading.” “Amount they were read to as a child.” The answers were flowing, building on one another. I stepped away from the board. “Okay, with someone sitting next you—what comes to your mind as you look at these responses?” I heard quiet conversations punctuated by head shaking and hands being thrown in the air. I gestured to one of the hand-throwers. “I need to know—what are the dramatics about?” She stood to give weight to her response: “What this list tells me is that basically the majority of what impacts our students’ vocabularies is completely out of our control.”

Why This Item Is Important

What that teacher announced in the anecdote is partially true; there are many aspects to our students’ knowledge of words that is out of our control. Our students come to school in kindergarten with an imaginary number above their head, representing the amount of words to which they have been exposed, birth to age five. This number is influenced by so many factors, many of which the teachers listed:

• Socio-economic status (SES)
• Parents’ level of education
• Number of adults in the dwelling
• Experiences, like travel and museums
• Time spent with books, whether reading themselves or being read to

Each of these items has been quantified separately, in varying, often controversial, studies. In a recent (uncontroversial) study, a group of researchers at Ohio State University focused only on the number of books a child had heard by the time they reached kindergarten (Logan, Justice, Yumus, & Chaparro-Moreno, 2019). The difference between a child who heard five books a day versus a child who heard less than a book a day could mean a huge gap in vocabulary and reading knowledge—the child who was read to extensively was exposed to at least a million more words than their average counterparts (Logan et al., 2019).

With stats like these, it’s no wonder the teacher earlier threw up her hands in frustration—there is a lot out of our control when it comes to closing the gap in word knowledge in our students. Luckily, there is research out there that teachers can lean into to help fully prepare them to meet their students where they are and grow them into vocabularians.

Do This—Not That principle #1: DO understand the theory about vocabulary acquisition and instruction to better reach students; DON’T ignore or lack a research base on vocabulary instruction.

To Get Started

If you have read any of the books in the Do This—Not That series, you know that this chapter is a serious departure. I have always prided myself on being a practitioner first and a researcher second—meaning that my books are full of strategies and while based in theory, I tend to skim it in favor of the classroom activities. I recognize that teachers want the “how”—how do I make vocabulary instruction meaningful in my classroom? Which, in my mind, translated to, “What strategies can I use?” It was during a workshop, like the one described in the anecdote earlier, that I realized how hungry teachers were for the “why”—why did their students come to them with a gap in vocabulary knowledge? We talked through the factors, and then I asked them to start with themselves—how many of them would be considered lacking when starting kindergarten, taking into account the amount they were read to, their parents’ education level, their socioeconomic status, etc.? Without knowing their own number and without outing themselves, I asked them to silently consider if they would be at a deficit. I then asked teachers to think about their students—what kind of gap were their students facing, given these factors? Teachers then spoke in small groups about their students. As we moved on with our work to think about helping students make up this gap, a teacher raised his hand: “I needed this perspective. So often we are given strategies to solve a problem, but we never really identify the source of the problem. I feel ready to tackle this.”

In response, I offer you this: Five things that every teacher should know about vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary instruction. These five ideas will support the rest of your learning and the strategies presented in the following nine chapters.

#1: There Is No Substitute for Wide Reading in the Building of Vocabularies

“Is there a workbook I could buy to help my child grow their vocabulary?” This is a question I have received often from well-meaning friends and family. They do not like my response: “No! Buy books! Read with them! Have them read to you! Go to a library and check out a million books! Read, and then read, and then read some more! This will grow a child’s vocabulary!” I usually lose them when I say library—sigh.

The people that you know who have the biggest, baddest vocabularies are not those that were forced to complete workbooks on summer vacation (although they could probably provide you with the name of a good therapist). Individuals with large vocabularies are all generally voracious readers. These people have unconsciously absorbed how language works and picked up new words and phrases from their reading.

Creating and nurturing independent reading in a variety of texts is the single most important thing a teacher (or parent) can do to create wordsmiths (Allen, 2007; Ivey & Broaddus, 2007; Krashen, 1993; Lapp, Fisher, & Jacobson, 2008; Nagy, 1988; Ohianan, 2006; Suk, 2016). A seminal study by Nagy and Anderson (1984) identified that students will need to learn roughly 500,000 new words by the time they graduate high school. There is no way any workbook, worksheet, or program can come anywhere close to that number—having our students choose to pick up books or any of their word-wise alternatives (magazines, podcasts, audio books, etc.) is the best way to help students meet and greet the words they will need to succeed.

Take a look at your classroom and school practices—how widely do students read? How are students encouraged as readers? What kind of access do students have to a multitude of texts across content areas? How do teachers model good reading practices? And NO, this is not just an English-teacher thing. Reading in all disciplines needs to be modeled, practiced, and celebrated to grow students’ vocabularies.

#2: Direct Instruction on Important Vocabulary Can Be Necessary

You are going to have do direct instruction on a set of vocabulary words that are central to your content. These words are the “stepping-stones” to your content (Boyd, Sullivan, Popp, & Hughes, 2012), leading students to the ability to read, discuss, and write with confidence about the topic of study. As the instructor, you are going to have to make important decisions about which words deserve direct instruction (Chapter 2) and then decide how students will interact with these words (Chapters 5–10).

Direct instruction gets a bad rap. When I say those words, you picture a teacher droning on in front of a PowerPoint presentation and students with heads down on desks or buried in their phones. The difference between good direct instruction and bad is student application—I can take 10 minutes to highlight the content vocabulary that unlocks the topic we are about to study as long as I take time later that day or that week for students to apply their knowledge of those words in a way that promotes engagement and understanding. Looking up definitions of those words is not engaging nor promoting understanding (I will stand on a soapbox about that in Chapter 4). Having students manipulate and use the words to promote ownership means that the 10 minutes I spent in direct instruction was worth it. And the ultimate payoff? The students’ ability to transfer those words to their own speaking and writing.

#3: But Direct Instruction of Important Vocabulary Cannot Be the Only Way That Students Are Exposed to New Words in Your Classroom

If we go back to the Nagy and Anderson (1984) study mentioned earlier, using direct instruction to teach the 500,000 vocabulary words students would need to master prior to graduation would be impossible. Instead we need to help students tackle academic texts in three ways:

• Understand how context clues works. In Chapter 6, we look at the type of texts that teachers can use to help students see how authors embed context clues into nonfiction text.
• Use morphological clues to unlock multisyllabic words. Chapter 6 will also talk about the importance of Greek and Latin root study. If one Greek or Latin root can unlock the meaning of at least 25 other words in the English language (Rasinski, Padak, Newton, & Newton, 2010), then morphological study needs to be a central part of all classroom instruction.
• Understand academic language like signal and polysemic words. Multiple meaning, or polysemic, words that cross content areas are often the power words that help students understand how complex the English language is—if they know that a word like star can have different meanings depending on context, they are that much closer to reading with fluency and comprehension rather than just being a word caller (Seifert & Espin, 2012). Similarly, signal words like however or therefore can help a reader understand an author’s intentions and help organize a text for better comprehension. Students’ use of and exposure to both types of words, polysemic and signal, can help strengthen their comprehension of academic texts and their ability to discuss and write about academic topics.

#4: Encourage Domain-Specific Vocabulary in the Classroom

Stuff. Thing. We all know the words that students tend to favor instead of using the word that fits best with the subject area. We need to model the type of language that makes our content area unique and expect our students to use the same type of language back. One of the easiest ways to do this is to build, refer to, and extend the use of a word wall in your classroom (Chapter 8). Whether paper or digital, a word ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Setup of This Book
• Supplemental Downloads
• New to This Edition
• Do This—Not That!
• Foreword
• 1 Five Things Every Educator Should Know About Vocabulary Acquisition and Instruction
• 2 Purposeful Teacher Selection of Focus Words
• 3 Purposeful Student Selection of Focus Words
• 4 Help Students Come Up With Their Own Definitions
• 5 Use Strategies to Engage Students in Word Study
• 6 Teach Students Morphological Strategies to Figure Out Words They Do Not Know, in Addition to Context-Clue Strategies
• 7 Use Symbols, Pictures, and Movement to Help Bring Vocabulary to Life
• 8 Highlight and Use a Word Wall in Classroom Instruction
• 9 Use and Apply Vocabulary Words Regularly (Versus Isolated Practice)
• 10 Assess Student Use of Words in Authentic Writing and Speaking
• References