Laying the Foundations
One teacher's journey
I've just realised that I've created over 700 slides in the first four weeks of term. Why? Because our school has introduced a consistent way to teach and review vocabulary. Why is teaching vocabulary important? Vocabulary is one of the five keys of reading (along with phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency and comprehension). Teaching vocabulary is important in laying a foundation for students to build on. Students who know what a wider variety of words mean are able to unlock the meaning of texts more successfully than the child who struggles to understand what different words mean. In fact, students who have a broader vocabulary will also be better equipped to determine the meaning of unknown words when they encounter them. This is an example of the Matthew effect, where "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." This is an equity issue because students with limited vocabularies will struggle to learn new words from context alone and comprehend the full meaning of texts. What words should we teach? Given the vast number of words in the English language it is nigh on impossible to teach every word at school. I did the maths: it would require teaching a unique word every five minutes! If we can't teach every word, which ones should we spend time focusing on? Students come to school already knowing many common words (tree, happy, shop, ball, tired). We don't really need to teach these as many children already know how to use these words. Of course we may need actively teach these if students come to us from language backgrounds other than English, or have developmental language delays etc. There are also words that have a specific definition that is context dependent. We don't use these words unless we are referring to that exact thing (pedagogy, atmosphere, hypotenuse). These words need to be taught when we are teaching about that particular topic. The rest of the words are used in a variety of different contexts and are what makes English such a rich language. This area include words like delectable, envy, graze and greed. These words are more likely to appear in written English, rather than spoken- which is one reason we need to ensure students have time to explore rich texts in class. I also think that this category of words are the ones that we can get the most bang for our buck- when students learn these words they can use them in a range of contexts. These three categories of words can be referred to as tier 1, 2 and 3. While there are definitely times when we need to explicitly teach tier 1 and tier 3 words, most of our time should be focused on tier 2 words. These are the types of words that students can use repeatedly in different contexts. It should be noted that these tiers are not distinct and there is plenty of grey area between each tier. A guiding principle in selecting words at our school has been: which words do I want to see my students use? How should we teach vocabulary? Once upon a time when I was teaching a new word to students I would first ask them if anyone knew what it meant. This typically resulted in students telling me definitions that were incorrect, or at best partially correct. The problem I then faced was, not only had I wasted a few precious minutes of instruction, but other students had now heard incorrect definitions and may have developed fresh misconceptions. At my current school we follow a simple procedure to explicitly teach new words:
Our review activities include matching words to definitions, working out what word fits in a sentence, and coming up with our own sentences. I started to get even fancier with the variety of activities in our review, but quickly realised that keeping it simple was better for our students. Instead of having to think about what each activity is asking them to do, they are free to focus on retrieving the words they have previously learnt. Likewise, I also started to explore word matrices, but again realised that this was overcomplicating it (for the moment).
If you want to see a sample week then click here. Resources: I use etymonline.com for the teacher notes. I've found wordsmyth.net gives consistently student-friendly definitions. Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction by Beck, McKeown & Kucan is my go to resource.
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I'm JamesI am a father of two (8 & 5), married to an incredible Early Childhood Educator. Archives
June 2024
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