Strategies for Teaching Reading

Strategies for Teaching Reading

Components of

Healthy Reading Programs

from Every Child Reading: An Action Plan

Pre-kindergarten/Kindergarten Programs

 

·         Language skills. Students should have the ability to describe their experiences, to predict what will happen in the future, and to talk about events that happened in the past.

·         Language concepts. Students should have experience with certain language concepts such as colors and shapes, prepositions (e.g., under/over, before/after), sequence (e.g., small to large), and classification (e.g., animals, plants, and toys).

·         Background knowledge. Children need to understand their own world in order to understand what they read. Exposure to content in science, history, and geography are necessary for a child’s background knowledge.

·         Appreciation of stories and books. Exposure to stories as active listeners and as active participants is vital to the reading process. Reading aloud provides children the opportunity to experience active reading when we stop to discuss how the character may feel and what the character might do, but most importantly, it allows for prediction of how the story may end. This builds anticipation and strengthens the desire to read. When reading is completed, children should be able to retell the story or arrange pictures from the story in correct order.

·         Concepts of print. Reading is done left to right with space between words, punctuation for direction, and meaning connected to each word and word group.

·         Phonemic awareness. Phonemes are basic speech sounds made by letters, and phonemic awareness is the knowledge that words are sequences of phonemes. Rhyming words build effective first steps for this concept.

·         Alphabet and letter sounds. Children should be able to identify letters and their sounds. By the completion of kindergarten, students should be able to recognize, name, and print letters, and know the sounds they represent.

Beginning Reading Programs

 

·         Training in alphabetical basics. These include knowledge of phonemic awareness, letter recognition, letter/sound recognition, and print concepts.

·         A proper balance between phonics and meaning in their instruction. All children need exposure to phonics in order to decode words – research supports that proficient readers rely on deep and ready knowledge of spelling-sound correspondence while reading. High poverty areas need explicit phonetic instruction.

·         Strong reading materials. If decoding skills are taught, it makes sense to provide materials that practice those skills. Sounding out words from a text that is well written and engaging and uses new words reinforces reading instruction. Research shows that the children who learn to read most effectively are the children who read the most and are most highly motivated.

·         Strategies for teaching comprehension. Establish a purpose for reading, model effective reading, and conclude with summary activity. These are known as before, during, and after reading strategies.

·         Writing programs. Children should begin creative and expository writing in kindergarten continuing throughout their education. As for temporary spelling, it is not in conflict with teaching correct spelling. Temporary spelling allows students to practice phonemic awareness while focused instruction in spelling can occur simultaneously.

·         Smaller class size. In the early grades, smaller class sizes of 15 to those of around 25 do have a significant impact on reading achievement when coupled with effective reading strategies.

·         Curriculum-based assessment. This assessment is needed to guide decisions about grouping, pace of instruction, and individual needs for assistance. Its purpose is to allow teachers to see how students are progressing using the curriculum, not for national norms. Informal assessment can be as valuable as formal assessment. Regular school-wide assessments based on students’ current reading groups can be given every six to 10 weeks and should be aligned to district and/or state assessments.

·         Other notions to improve reading: Grouping, Tutoring, and Home Reading.

“By the end of first grade, with high-quality instruction and necessary tutoring or other assistance, most students should, in fact, be able to decode virtually any phonetically regular short word with short or long vowels and read a large number of high frequency sight words.” p.16

Second Grade and Beyond

 

·         Fluency. Children need to have solid comprehension skills, both for understanding material they read on their own and for material that is read to them. They need to learn to monitor their own comprehension for confusion and uncertainty. This can develop into a real joy for reading.

·         Literature. Students should be reading high quality literature appropriate to current grade level, both in school and at home.

·         Expository text (content knowledge). Strong comprehension strategies are needed for students to comprehend science, history, geography, and other content area texts. Background knowledge of expository text is also vital; research finds that one of the best predictors of reading comprehension is background knowledge. Therefore, it makes sense to infuse expository material into reading instruction and to teach effective reading comprehension strategies and study skills in all content areas.

·         Reading Comprehension. Everything teachers do in reading class and beyond should be designed to build children’s ability to understand increasingly complex content. Children need to learn reading strategies known to enhance comprehension and retention. These are primarily before, during, and after reading strategies.

·         Vocabulary. Research indicates that specific words taught from reading texts and then used by students in a variety of contexts produce better results than direct vocabulary instruction. Furthermore, the amount and variety of material children read heavily influence vocabulary growth.

·         Writing. Specific instruction in writing for different audiences and purposes, as well as instruction in strategies that enrich and clarify language expression, is essential. Language mechanics skills, such as capitalization, usage, and grammar, can be directly taught and integrated into students’ own writing through the editing process.

Older Nonreaders

A number of children at the upper elementary, middle, and high school levels are reading poorly or not at all. There is critical need for further research to identify effective strategies and programs for remediation in reading for older children; however, we do know some promising approaches that can be applied now.

·         Motivation. Many older students avoid reading because they avoid failure. Students need the increased opportunity to experience positive, challenging, and successful reading situations.

·         Word recognition. When this becomes evident, structured phonics and spelling instruction are warranted. This can be handled through one-to-one tutoring.

·         Comprehension. Children who are adequate decoders but poor “comprehenders” can be taught comprehension strategies in which they summarize information, generate questions, retell stories or other content, and learn to monitor their own comprehension.

Every Child Reading: An Action Plan

Learning First Alliance

1001 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.

Suite 335

Washington, D.C. 20036

June 1998

3 Powerful Learning Strategies

Learning Strategies are tactics employed to achieve certain goals. Many strategies have been identified through the years (see, for example, Kucan & Beck, 1997; Laycock & Russell, 1941; Weinstein & Mayer, 1986), a few of which are visualizing information, rereading troublesome parts of a passage, reviewing information frequently, and creating mnemonic devices. Students might have appropriate levels of motivation, their content knowledge might be sufficient and active, and their attention might be directed to information, but they still have difficulty understanding and remembering text information because of their learning strategies. Three powerful strategies that can be incorporated readily into prereading lessons are predicting, connecting, and organizing (Moore, Moore, Cunningham, & Cunningham, 1998).

Predicting involves anticipating information in a passage and calls for readers to think ahead while reading. Once readers have a set of expectations for a passage, they can read and see which expectations are met, which are not, and what unexpected information is encountered. Students who do not predict upcoming information generally are unprepared for the stream of ideas they encounter while reading. Helping students predict information is an essential strategy which can lead to improved reading comprehension. Teaching strategies that help students predict the content of passages written about diverse topics can be converted to learning strategies by having students assume responsibility for previewing passages and forming predictions.

Connecting to students’ prior knowledge is perhaps the best way to ensure the learning of new information. Connecting involves relating what is being presented to what is already known. Connecting information enhances learning. New concepts are fitted into preexisting concepts, thereby holding information in place and providing access to it. Teaching strategies that promote prediction also promote connections.

Organizing information is another powerful learning strategy. Students who arrange ideas according to meaningful classifications have an advantage over those who do not. Part of organizing information involves following the pattern of ideas presented by an author. Readers who are sensitive to an author’s writing patterns typically learn more than readers who are insensitive to the patterns. Thus, it seems worthwhile to help students determine whether passages are written according to a pattern such as time sequence, simple listing, or problem solution.

Another part of organizing information involves assimilating ideas according to readers’ prior knowledge. This aspect of organizing is quite similar to connecting information.

      Asking and Answering Questions Before Reading

 

Strategies

 

1.      Question-Answer Relationships (QAR) is an activity that helps students answer comprehension questions more effectively by analyzing the task demands of various types of questions.

2.      The Directed Reading Activity (DRA) uses teacher questions to activate prior knowledge, create interest, and establish purpose for reading.

3.      The Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE) is another, more eclectic strategy that uses teacher questions as the basis for the prereading engagement of students with text.

4.      The ReQuest procedure helps students formulate their own questions about the text they are reading and develop effective questioning behaviors.

5.      The Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DRTA) provides guided practice for students in setting their own purposes for reading.

6.      The Survey Technique helps students preview a text and independently formulate their own purposes for reading.

Levels of Processing

Pearson and Johnson (1978) provide a framework for developing questions that help students use their own thoughts and prior experiences to interact with information in a text. The levels of processing construct is a tool to help teachers lead students beyond merely imitating an author’s words. Pearson and Johnson propose three levels of text processing: text explicit, text implicit, and script implicit or experience-based.

o        Text explicit processing uses the explicit language of the text to cue the reader. It allows readers to point to the answer in the text where there is only one correct answer.

o        Text implicit processing requires readers to determine an appropriate answer drawn from the text and from their prior knowledge. Readers are asked to infer what the text implicitly states and elaborate on given information. Readers take the facts presented in the text and add their own prior knowledge to derive a plausible answer implied by the author.

o        Experience-based processing requires readers to think beyond what is stated in the text. These responses are based mainly on reader experience, as they are not obtained directly from the text.

Question-Answer Relationships (QAR-Raphael, 1984,1986). This strategy helps students identify responses to questions. Using Pearson and Johnson’s levels of process construct, Raphael relabeled the three levels for ease of understanding. Her terminology, and the mnemonics used for each, are

 

·         right there (text explicit) – words used to create the question and words used for the answer are in the same sentence;

 

·         think and search (text implicit) – the answer is in the text, but words used in the question and those in the answer are not in the same sentence; and

 

·         on my own (experience-based) – the answer is not found in the text.

Teaching students to use QAR’s is based on four instructional principles:

·         Give immediate feedback

·         Progress from shorter to longer texts

·         Begin with simple questions and progress to complex questions, and

·         Develop independence by beginning with group learning exercises and progressing to individual, independent activities.

Raphael suggests teaching QAR’s in three stages, essentially moving students from easier, shorter, teacher-guided texts to more difficult, longer, independent texts.

2. The Directed Reading Activity (DRA-Tierney & Readence, 2000). This strategy was developed as a comprehensive means of guiding students through a text selection and can be used as a unit-based or lesson-based strategy.

The prereading stage involves activating students’ prior knowledge related to the text selection, creating motivation to read it, and setting purpose(s) for reading. Questions can play an important role in preparing students to read the text.

Teachers can ask text implicit or experience-based questions to engage students’ prior knowledge and stimulate their interest in the text. Even more crucial is asking a question or questions that will guide students through the entire selection. If you do not give a specific purpose for reading, students may treat all information as equally important and attempt to master it all. Teachers’ overall concern in designing a purpose-setting question should be what students should know after reading the text. Although some students may lack sufficient knowledge to deal with these questions before reading, they are intended to generate discussion and to discover what knowledge students possess.

·         What color is the sunlight?

·         Why is the sky blue during the day and sometimes red at sunset?

Concept focus questions, or those that establish a purpose for reading, follow these questions.

·         Can you read a book if you are in a dark closet? Why or why not?

·         Can you read a book in the darkness of outer space?

Finally, the last question should increase students’ anticipation and demonstrate the higher order questions necessary to guide students through an assigned text.

·         Why is it possible to read in outer space even though daylight does not exist?

3. Scaffolding Reading Experience (SRE-Graves & Graves, 1994). The premise

behind the SRE is the notion of scaffolding, or providing students with the necessary assistance in preparation, guidance, and follow-up to help them make connections with the text. What distinguishes the SRE from other instructional frameworks, such as the DRA, is that preset activities to use with the text are not prescribed. Rather, SRE is viewed as a flexible framework that provides teachers with instructional options in which they are able to select the most appropriate activities to use with particular students, texts, and purposes for reading.

In the SRE prereading, activities include, but might not be limited to

·         activating background knowledge

·         building text-specific knowledge

·         direction setting

·         motivating

·         relating the reading to students’ lives

·         predicting

·         prequestioning

·         preteaching concepts

·         preteaching vocabulary

·         suggesting comprehension strategies

Guided Practice in Student Questioning

The key to active comprehension is to guide instruction so that skill in asking questions will transfer from teachers to students. Therefore, a three-stage model is suggested for transfer of questioning:

1.      Modeling where teachers demonstrate what constitutes a good questioning behavior including taking students through lesson, demonstrating the kinds of questions to ask, and modeling the process of thinking involved in designing questions

2.      Phase out/ phase in strategies where students progress with positive reinforcement to independent questioning

3.      As student move to the independent questioning stage without teacher prompting, they are engaging in active comprehension.

ReQuest (Manzo, 1969) is an abbreviation of reciprocal questioning. This helps students

1.      Formulate their own questions about the text they are reading

2.      Develop an active inquiring attitude toward reading

3.      Acquire purposes for their reading, and

4.      Develop independent comprehension abilities.

This requires that students and teacher silently read portions of text and take turns asking and answering questions concerning that material. It is this reciprocal nature of questioning sequence that differentiates ReQuest from teacher-directed questioning strategies and provides the format for students’ active involvement.

The ReQuest technique consists of

o        Preparing the text

o        Readying the students

o        Developing questioning behaviors

o        Developing predictive behaviors

o        Reading silently

o        Discussing the reading

In preparing, be sure that the difficulty level of the text is suitable for the students and decide how much material will be read at one time (one sentence, paragraph, page, etc.). The ability and maturity levels of the students dictate the amount of text to be read. Finally, identify appropriate points in the text where predictions will be elicited.

The Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (Stauffer, 1969) Essentially, the DRTA involves three steps:

1.      Predicting what the text is about through analysis of its content

2.      Reading the text that has been appropriately “chunked”

3.      Proving, through the examination of evidence, that the predictions were correct or incorrect

After having read the initial segment, students close their text and begin to examine the evidence. Previous predictions concerning the text should be evaluated in light of this new information. New predictions are made, and the next segment is read. As reading progresses, predictions, which at first may be divergent, will converge as more information is amassed.

Prereading Activities for Content Area Reading and Learning, 3^rd edition

Readence, Moore, and Rickelman

ISBN # 0-87207-261-4 (publication of the International Reading Association, www.reading.org)

Strategic Reading: What to Do with Your Students

Good Reading Instruction begins before any actual reading takes place. This is called Pre-reading, and it is extremely important to utilize these strategies for successful reading to occur. Why? It focuses the reader on the topic or theme, allows readers to share ideas and notions about the text, but most importantly, establishes a purpose for the reader to read the text.

Strategy: Frontloading: Bridging Knowledge to Text.

Too often students are unaware of what they are preparing to read. We MUST prepare them. Introduce the text utilizing discussion or a brief writing assignment to discover what students know about the topic or theme. This allows us to focus the lesson to the students’ needs. It’s a time saver since we are teaching what we KNOW the students need.

·         Show a video clip of a related topic.

·         For non-fiction reading, prepare an anticipation guide.

·         Listen to a song on a related topic.

·         With older students, read aloud from a children’s book.

·         Make a connection to a previous reading or personal experience.

·         Discuss a “hypothetical” situation asking students to consider what they might do in a similar situation.

·         Use photographs or artwork to introduce story themes

·         Read a poem with similar ideas and discuss it.

Strategy: Previewing: Taking a Close Look at the Assignment.

Give students the chance to discover for themselves what an assigned text might be about.

·         Encourage them to examine the cover of a book and discuss the artwork.

·         Read critical comments from the back of the book.

·         Discuss the book title exploring why the author may have selected it.

·         Look for chapter titles, subtitles, and graphic aids.

·         Examine the title and copyright pages.

·         Note and discuss dedications and contemplate why the author might have made this decision.

·         Make predictions about what our expectations for reading might be based on our preview.

Naturally, Good Reading Instruction continues During Reading.

Strategy: Chunking: Making Reading Manageable combined with Strategy: Predictions: Involving the Reader in the Text.

This is a suggestion that helps students focus on metacognition and establishes a personal interest in the text.

Chunking the text narrows reading to specific pages, paragraphs, or sections. Whether reading silently or aloud from this chunked text, complete the reading in class, discussing what information has been obtained in the assignment. Then ask students to make predictions about what might develop as the plot unfolds. Record the predictions and use them as motivation to see whose predictions prove correct.

Strategy: Formulating Questions: Authentic Research NOW!

As students read, have them formulate questions that they might ask of the author or character. As they read, have them search for answers to their questions. When they find an answer, have them write a response. Point out that they have just discovered the reason for research: searching for answers to our own questions.

As one might expect, Good Reading Instruction does not end with the completion of the last page. Many of us use questions at this time to check for comprehension, but now you might consider trying another After Reading Strategy.

Strategy: Graphic Organizers: Hanging on to Knowledge

Provide students with a graphic organizer.

Some suggestions for your branches might be to list

·         Characteristics of a character

·         Places the character visits

·         Friends the character encounters

·         Problems of the character

·         New words discovered

·         Solutions to problems

Strategy: Sentence Manipulation: Grammar as Reading?!

Provide students with sentences or stems from the text or based on the text.

·         Expand a fragment with knowledge from the text.

·         Match an independent/main clause with the appropriate subordinate/dependent clause.

·         Replace words in a sentence with better words (certainly a way to do vocabulary).

·         Combine simple sentences into compound sentences.

Researched-based Strategies for Struggling Readers

Good news in the area of assistance for struggling readers surfaces in new Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) report.

Building Reading Proficiency at the Secondary Level: A Guide to the Resources (C. Peterson, D. Caverly, S. Nicholson, S. O’Neal, & S. Cusenbary) is available at the SEDL website. It can be ordered in hardcopy or downloaded in PDF format (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).

http://www.sedl.org/pub/catalog/items/read16.html

What does this report reveal?

It reveals that there are currently 15 strategies that can be utilized across the content areas to assist the struggling reader. Naturally, some are more effective than others are, but all come with proven support research depending on the appropriateness to the population being served, level of implementation by the teacher, and the attitude of the teacher about the use of the strategy.

·         Background Knowledge Strategies

·         Collaborative Strategic Reading

·         Dictated Stories

·         Fluency Strategies

·         Generative Vocabulary

·         Independent Reading

·         KWL Plus

·         Literature-Based Reading Instruction

·         Reader Response

·         Reading Guides

·         Reciprocal Teaching

·         Text Mapping

·         Vocabulary/Concept Mapping

·         Word Analysis Strategies

      Preparing Students to Read in the Content Areas

Since the turn of the century professional literature has recognized the value of preparing students for reading. Consider the work of DeGarmo, 1896 and McMurray, 1909 to Alexander and Jetton, 2000, who profess that students seeking to learn from unfamiliar documents “require clear scaffolding that aids them in building a meaningful base of content knowledge and the seeds of personal interest.”

Scaffolding means supporting students before, during, and after they read. It is a process of enabling students to accomplish what is normally beyond their abilities. Scaffolding means providing enough help so students can succeed with a task that otherwise would be impossible (Graves & Graves, 1994).

Scaffolding is accomplished by

·         Relating passage contents to the students’ worlds

·         Presenting key vocabulary prior to encountering it in the text

·         Noting the organization of a passage so that students can use it as a tool for understanding

·         Introducing students to general ideas they will encounter within the text

·         Encouraging an active search for meaning

Issues to Consider When Scaffolding

Instructional time frames are extremely important to teacher planning. Yearly planning often includes articulating a vision, then deciding how those intentions will be shared. Vision statements such as “To become independent lifelong learners” or a slogan like “Reading gives us power!” can be posted in the room and acts as a guide to everyday decision making and reflecting by everyone in the class. Yearly planning addresses the issues of the curriculum, namely, the achievement of standards. Awareness of standards affords teachers the opportunity to create units, lessons, and activities that focus on particular strengths and weaknesses of our students.

Ways to encourage content reading at the beginning of the year:

o        Teachers conduct a discussion on how to use the various features of a text

o        Students survey texts and recommend ways to use them (Huffman, 1996).

Text Surveys begin with the teacher introducing the text as if it were a new member of the class, noting why this “member” is joining the class and giving some general background on it. Students generate a list of questions and then survey the text to find what is in it for them. Next, they conduct a whole-class follow up to address what features they found and how best to utilize them. Involve the students in making some decisions about the text. For example, if the text has practice exercises, decide how they should be used; or if there is no glossary, then the class might create their own.

Unit planning is a middle level of instructional planning that encompasses blocks of time lasting from a few days to a few weeks. Units of instruction embed teaching-learning processes around organizing centers such as a(n)

o        Genre (poetry, short story)

o        Issue (What should be done about pollution?)

o        Novel (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry or Maniac Magee)

o        Theme (identity, patterns), and

o        Topic (solar system, colonial America).

Units that pose central questions about their organizing centers go far in emphasizing productive reading and thinking (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). Central questions define students as problem solvers addressing multilayered and provocative concerns that cannot be answered in a single sentence. The questions engage students with course contents, allowing multiple responses at different levels of sophistication. The following queries exemplify central questions:

o        What is a hero?

o        Who is a friend?

o        Why is the weather difficult to predict?

o        What most influences healthy human development?

o        In which decade of the 1900s were Americans better off?

o        What are the appropriate limits to freedom of speech?

o        How do individuals effect change?

This process facilitates the blending of curriculum standards and scaffolding. For example, students might be comparing and contrasting historical figures to determine the characteristics of a hero.

Lessons are teaching events that focus on definite learning tasks that enable students to accomplish general expectations. After conducting a task analysis of a unit’s central question, consulting curriculum standards, and thinking about students’ competencies, teachers might see the need for several lessons to provide appropriate scaffolding. In a unit on heroism, we might decide to teach a lesson on gathering information (e.g., accessing Internet sites, library materials, and personal interviews) or one on assigning adjectives (e.g., crafty, resolute, dignified) that characterize literary and real-life people.

Data Chart

Character	Situations Encountered	Actions Performed	Personal Characteristics
Superman
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Uncle Willie

            Reading in the Content Areas: Strategies for Success

Survey Q3R

This strategy successfully assists students with comprehension and retention of important information from textbooks at various levels. It is divided into 5 steps. As with several strategies, this one works best when it is lead by a professional!

Step 1: Survey or Preview: Using scanning and skimming skills survey or preview the entire chapter from start to stop. Give special attention to Introduction, Titles and subtitles, and opening sentences of paragraphs. Take note of pictures, maps, graphs, diagrams, tables, and other chapter aids.

In all actuality, this activity should be a cornerstone of classroom instruction. The benefits of surveying or previewing each reading selection are immeasurable considering that it increases comprehension. It also allows for students to communicate in a non-threatening forum exactly what they may or may not know about a given topic.

Make Surveying or Previewing (whichever title suits your style) a standard classroom practice. Another important point of note: You set the tone for learning in your classroom. If you approach the Surveying/Previewing with enthusiasm for your content, you will likely see a marked change in your students’ attitudes.

Step 2: Question: Using the results of Step 1, you and the students formulate questions about the chapter’s content. Let the students guide the way; this will allow them to have a vested interest in the reading (a.k.a., authentic questioning, answering questions most important to learning). To begin, suggest turning subtitles into questions.

Step 3: Question: Students are now ready to read the text of a selective basis. While reading, students answer the questions they formulated int Step 2 (What’s selective basis? Ut requires students to fill in their reading gaps by capitalizing on prior knowledge. If they correctly answered the question before reading, consider it a correct answer.) This technique allows them to become actively involved in the reading process.

Step 4: Recite: Students share their findings (i.e. the answers to their questions.) This can be done in a discussion format or by turning in written responses. A suggestion: Keep it broken down or “chunked” by subtitles to monitor student success.

Step 5: Review: This activity follows the reading of the entire chapter. Focus on important concepts, generalizations, and facts they have acquired. Encourage them to use written notes or the text when responding.

       

Focus Reading: Grounding Students in the Text Ground Students in the Text

Use the text as much as possible. When answering questions, have students provide page numbers where the correct answer can be found. Have them take their classmates right to the spot – page, paragraph, and sentence – on that special page. Ask the class to find that spot. Find a volunteer reader to read the passage. Discuss it.

Focus Read

Use this strategy in combination with Grounding Students in the Text. This strategy allows teachers to “guide” students on a “cognitive quest”. Through this method, students are exposed to different methods of thinking and processing materials. It is like a “show and tell” for the reading circle. Everyone discusses in depth their conclusions, the process of arriving at a conclusion, and thinking strategies that lead to such conclusions. This is a particularly effective strategy when a key concept is revealed.

Step 1: Give students a certain passage of text of manageable length – two pages maximum. Skipping or splitting text is permitted. (Ex. First paragraph on page 24; then read the third and fourth paragraphs on page 25.)

Step 2: Ask 3 to 5 very specific questions directly related to the selected text. These questions are best devised to follow a path from fact to inference or deduction. For example:

1) List the words from this text that describe the character.

2) When you examine this isolated list of words, what do you imagine? Explain why you see this image.

3) Re-read the fourth paragraph on page 25. Describe how the character responds in this situation.

4) Given your image from #2 and your response from #3, what can you infer about this character’s morals?

5) Do you agree with the author and his character? Why or why not?

Step 3: Discuss, Discuss, Discuss! This is the “teachable moment” that you have created. Show students how they arrived at their responses. Allow them to recommend other solutions. Encourage prediction to continue interest in reading. Carpe Diem!

 

 

Teaching Vocabulary To Advanced Students: A Lexical Approach

Teaching Vocabulary To Advanced Students: A Lexical Approach

var sc_project=500969; var sc_partition=3; var sc_invisible=1;  by Solange Moras, Sao Carlos, Brazil, July 2001

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1.    ADVANCED STUDENTS AND THEIR NEEDS

Advanced learners can generally communicate well, having learnt all the basic structures of the language. However, they need to broaden their vocabulary to express themselves more clearly and appropriately in a wide range of situations.  

Students might even have a receptive knowledge of a wider range of vocabulary, which means they can recognise the item and recognise its meaning. Nevertheless, their productive use of a wide range of vocabulary is normally limited, and this is one of the areas that need greater attention. At this stage we are concerned not only with students understanding the meaning of words, but also being able to use them appropriately, taking into account factors such as oral / written use of the language; degree of formality, style and others, which we are going to detail in Part 2. 

2.    THE TEACHING OF VOCABULARY 

Traditionally, the teaching of vocabulary above elementary levels was mostly incidental, limited to presenting new items as they appeared in reading or sometimes listening texts. This indirect teaching of vocabulary assumes that vocabulary expansion will happen through the practice of other language skills, which has been proved not enough to ensure vocabulary expansion. 

Nowadays it is widely accepted that vocabulary teaching should be part of the syllabus, and taught in a well-planned and regular basis. Some authors, led by Lewis (1993) argue that vocabulary should be at the centre of language teaching, because ‘language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar’. We are going to discuss aspects of the ‘Lexical approach’ in Part 2. 

There are several aspects of lexis that need to be taken into account when teaching vocabulary. The list below is based on the work of Gairns and Redman (1986): 

·      Boundaries between conceptual meaning: knowing not only what lexis refers to, but also where the boundaries are that separate it from words of related meaning (e.g. cup, mug, bowl).

·      Polysemy: distinguishing between the various meaning of a single word form with several but closely related meanings (head: of a person, of a pin, of an organisation).

·      Homonymy: distinguishing between the various meaning of a single word form which has several meanings which are NOT closely related ( e.g. a file: used to put papers in or a tool).

·      Homophyny:understanding words that have the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings (e.g. flour, flower).

·      Synonymy: distinguishing between the different shades of meaning that synonymous words have (e.g. extend, increase, expand).

·      Affective meaning: distinguishing between the attitudinal and emotional factors (denotation and connotation), which depend on the speakers attitude or the situation. Socio-cultural associations of lexical items is another important factor.

·      Style, register, dialect: Being able to distinguish between different levels of formality, the effect of different contexts and topics, as well as differences in geographical variation.

·      Translation: awareness of certain differences and similarities between the native and the foreign language (e.g. false cognates).

·      Chunks of language: multi-word verbs, idioms, strong and weak collocations, lexical phrases.

·      Grammar of vocabulary: learning the rules that enable students to build up different forms of the word or even different words from that word (e.g. sleep, slept, sleeping; able, unable; disability).

·      Pronunciation: ability to recognise and reproduce items in speech. 

The implication of the aspects just mentioned in teaching is that the goals of vocabulary teaching must be more than simply covering a certain number of words on a word list. We must use teaching techniques that can help realise this global concept of what it means to know a lexical item. And we must also go beyond that, giving learner opportunities to use the items learnt and also helping them to use effective written storage systems. 

2.1.     MEMORY AND STORAGE SYSTEMS 

Understanding how our memory works might help us create more effective ways to teach vocabulary. Research in the area, cited by Gairns (1986) offers us some insights into this process. 

It seems that learning new items involve storing them first in our short-term memory, and afterwards in long-term memory. We do not control this process consciously but there seems to be some important clues to consider. First, retention in short-term memory is not effective if the number of chunks of information exceeds seven. Therefore, this suggests that in a given class we should not aim at teaching more than this number. However, our long-term memory can hold any amount of information. 

Research also suggests that our ‘mental lexicon’ is highly organised and efficient, and that semantic related items are stored together. Word frequency is another factor that affects storage, as the most frequently used items are easier to retrieve. We can use this information to attempt to facilitate the learning process, by grouping items of vocabulary in semantic fields, such as topics (e.g. types of fruit). 

Oxford (1990) suggests memory strategies to aid learning, and these can be divided into:

·      creating mental linkages: grouping, associating, placing new words into a context;

·      applying images and sounds: using imagery, semantic mapping, using keywords and representing sounds in memory;

·      reviewing well, in a structured way;

·      employing action: physical response or sensation, using mechanical techniques.

The techniques just mentioned can be used to greater advantage if we can diagnose learning style preferences (visual, aural, kinesthetic, tactile) and make students aware of different memory strategies. 

Meaningful tasks however seem to offer the best answer to vocabulary learning, as they rely on students’ experiences and reality to facilitate learning. More meaningful tasks also require learners to analyse and process language more deeply, which should help them retain information in long-term memory.  

Forgetting seems to be an inevitable process, unless learners regularly use items they have learnt. Therefore, recycling is vital, and ideally it should happen one or two days after the initial input. After that, weekly or monthly tests can check on previously taught items. 

The way students store the items learned can also contribute to their success or failure in retrieving them when needed. Most learners simply list the items learnt in chronological order, indicating meaning with translation. This system is far from helpful, as items are de-contextualised, encouraging students to over generalise usage of them. It does not allow for additions and refinements nor indicates pronunciation.  

Teachers can encourage learners to use other methods, using topics and categories to organise a notebook, binder or index cards. Meaning should be stored using English as much as possible, and also giving indication for pronunciation. Diagrams and word trees can also be used within this topic/categories organisation. The class as a whole can keep a vocabulary box with cards, which can be used for revision/recycling regularly.  

Organising this kind of storage system is time-consuming and might not appeal to every learner. Therefore adapting their chronological lists to include headings for topics and a more complete definition of meaning would already be a step forward. 

2.2.        DEALING WITH MEANING 

In my opinion the most important aspect of vocabulary teaching for advanced learners is to foster learner independence so that learners will be able to deal with new lexis and expand their vocabulary beyond the end of the course. Therefore guided discovery, contextual guesswork and using dictionaries should be the main ways to deal with discovering meaning. 

Guided discovery involve asking questions or offering examples that guide students to guess meanings correctly. In this way learners get involved in a process of semantic processing that helps learning and retention.  

Contextual guesswork means making use of the context in which the word appears to derive an idea of its meaning, or in some cases, guess from the word itself, as in words of Latin origin. Knowledge of word formation, e.g. prefixes and suffixes, can also help guide students to discover meaning.  Teachers can help students with specific techniques and practice in contextual guesswork, for example, the understanding of discourse markers and identifying the function of the word in the sentence (e.g. verb, adjective, noun). The latter is also very useful when using dictionaries.  

Students should start using EFL dictionaries as early as possible, from Intermediate upwards.  With adequate training, dictionaries are an invaluable tool for learners, giving them independence from the teacher.  As well as understanding meaning, students are able to check pronunciation, the grammar of the word (e.g. verb patterns, verb forms, plurality, comparatives, etc.), different spelling (American versus British), style and register, as well as examples that illustrate usage. 

2.3.        USING LANGUAGE 

Another strategy for advanced learners is to turn their receptive vocabulary items into productive ones. In order to do that, we need to refine their understanding of the item, exploring boundaries between conceptual meaning, polysemy, synonymy, style, register, possible collocations, etc., so that students are able to use the item accurately.  

We must take into account that a lexical item is most likely to be learned when a learner feels a personal need to know it, or when there is a need to express something to accomplish the learner’s own purposes. Therefore, it means that the decision to incorporate a word in ones productive vocabulary is entirely personal and varies according to each student’s motivation and needs. 

Logically, production will depend on motivation, and this is what teachers should aim at promoting, based on their awareness of students needs and preferences. Task-based learning should help teachers to provide authentic, meaningful tasks in which students engage to achieve a concrete output, using appropriate language for the context.  

2.4.      THE LEXICAL APPROACH 

We could not talk about vocabulary teaching nowadays without mentioning Lewis (1993), whose controversial, thought-provoking ideas have been shaking the ELT world since its publication. We do not intend to offer a complete review of his work, but rather mention some of his contributions that in our opinion can be readily used in the classroom. 

His most important contribution was to highlight the importance of vocabulary as being basic to communication.  We do agree that if learners do not recognise the meaning of keywords they will be unable to participate in the conversation, even if they know the morphology and syntax. On the other hand, we believe that grammar is equally important in teaching, and therefore in our opinion, it is not the case to substitute grammar teaching with vocabulary teaching, but that both should be present in teaching a foreign language. 

Lewis himself insists that his lexical approach is not simply a shift of emphasis from grammar to vocabulary teaching, as ‘language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary, but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks’(Lewis, 1997). Chunks include collocations, fixed and semi-fixed expressions and idioms, and according to him, occupy a crucial role in facilitating language production, being the key to fluency. 

An explanation for native speakers’ fluency is that vocabulary is not stored only as individual words, but also as parts of phrases and larger chunks, which can be retrieved from memory as a whole, reducing processing difficulties. On the other hand, learners who only learn individual words will need a lot more time and effort to express themselves. 

Consequently, it is essential to make students aware of chunks, giving them opportunities to identify, organise and record these. Identifying chunks is not always easy, and at least in the beginning, students need a lot of guidance. 

Hill (1999) explains that most learners with ‘good vocabularies’ have problems with fluency because their ‘collocational competence’ is very limited, and that, especially from Intermediate level, we should aim at increasing their collocational competence with the vocabulary they have already got. For Advance learners he also suggests building on what they already know, using better strategies and increasing the number of items they meet outside the classroom. 

The idea of what it is to ‘know’ a word is also enriched with the collocational component. According to Lewis (1993) ‘being able to use a word involves mastering its collocational range and restrictions on that range’. I can say that using all the opportunities to teach chunks rather than isolated words is a feasible idea that has been working well in my classes, and which is fortunately coming up in new coursebooks we are using. However, both teachers and learners need awareness raising activities to be able to identify multi-word chunks. 

Apart from identifying chunks, it is important to establish clear ways of organising and recording vocabulary. According to Lewis (1993), ‘language should be recorded together which characteristically occurs together’, which means not in a linear, alphabetical order, but in collocation tables, mind-maps, word trees, for example. He also suggests the recording of whole sentences, to help contextualization, and that storage of items is highly personal, depending on each student’s needs. 

We have already mentioned the use of dictionaries as a way to discover meaning and foster learner independence.  Lewis extends the use of dictionaries to focus on word grammar and collocation range, although most dictionaries are rather limited in these. 

Lewis also defends the use of ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ material from the early stages of learning, because ‘acquisition is facilitated by material which is only partly understood’ (Lewis, 1993, p. 186). Although he does not supply evidence for this, I agree that students need to be given tasks they can accomplish without understanding everything from a given text, because this is what they will need as users of the language. He also suggests that it is better to work intensively with short extracts of authentic material, so they are not too daunting for students and can be explored for collocations. 

Finally, the Lexical Approach and Task-Based Learning have some common principles, which have been influencing foreign language teaching. Both approaches regard intensive, roughly-tuned input as essential for acquisition, and maintain that successful communication is more important than the production of accurate sentences. We certainly agree with these principles and have tried to use them in our class. 

3.    RATIONALE OF THE LESSON 

We believe that the Lexical Approach has much to offer in the area of vocabulary teaching, and therefore we have tried to plan a lesson that is based on its main concepts, specially exploring the use of collocations.  

3.1 CHOICE OF MATERIAL 

As both the Task-based and the Lexical approach suggest, we wanted to use authentic material to expose our students to rich, contextualised, naturally-occurring language.  

For the topic of holidays we chose a big number of holiday brochures (about twenty five) and read them through, trying to notice recurrent patterns of lexis. Confirming what Hill (1999) affirmed, this analysis showed us a large number of collocations, specially adjective + noun ones, and that some were extremely common, such as golden sandy beaches, rolling countryside and others. 

We did not want to overload students with much reading, which would detract them from the main task of working with vocabulary, and therefore we selected twenty-one short yet meaningful extracts in which common collocations appeared. 

3.2. NOTICING COLLOCATIONS AND DEALING WITH MEANING 

Although the extracts are authentic, we do not think students will have many problems in understanding most of the collocations, as they contain vocabulary which they probably know receptively. This again should confirm the idea that students know individual words but lack collocational competence. 

We are going to work as a whole class in step 5 to make students aware of the collocations we will be focusing on, and hopefully this will enable students to find other collocations. Regular awareness raising activities like this should help students improve their collocational competence, and even fluency, as discussed in part 2.4. 

For the few words that we predict students will not fully understand meaning of, or are not sure how they are pronounced, we are going to ask them to look these up in monolingual dictionaries. As we said in part 2.2., dictionaries are a vital tool for Advanced learners, and so is contextual guesswork, which we are going to encourage before they look the words up. We are also going to ask students to notice examples given in the dictionary, observing and recording other possible collocations of the words, as suggested by Lewis. 

We have also taken into account the importance of recording the vocabulary observed during the class. The list that students will produce in step 9, to prepare for the final task, is also a way of recording vocabulary in an organised, personalised and meaningful way, as suggested by Lewis in part 2.4. 

3.3. GROUP WORK        

Working in groups help fostering learning independence, and specially in vocabulary work, learners can exchange knowledge, asking others to explain unknown items. 

We also hope that group work will be a motivating factor, as students talk about places they have been on holiday to, trying to remember details together, exchanging impressions and even good memories! 

3.4. CHOICE OF TASK 

As we said earlier in part 2.3, we find it vital that students are given opportunities to use the language they are learning in a realistic context. Therefore, we have devised the final task to meet this principle. 

Writing a leaflet is a possible task in the Cambridge Certificate of Advanced English, which these students are preparing for. It is also a relevant, real life task that we expect will interest students. I always like to mention that the standard of leaflets written in English in Brazil is very poor, and that they could do a much better job. 

We expect that this writing should also enable students to use the vocabulary they have studied in a realistic context, and that they could be motivated to learn even more vocabulary they feel they need to accomplish the task. 

The completion of the final task for homework will also help to reinforce and revise the vocabulary learnt, giving students a better chance to store the items in their long-term memory, as we mentioned in part 2.1. 

We are going to explain what the final task will be right after step 3, in which they should notice what kind of text the extracts come from. By doing this we want to motivate students to do the enabling tasks, mainly to show them the need to learn new vocabulary. 

As this is a borrowed group, it might be the case the students are not yet familiar with the leaflet format, in which case more input would be necessary before the conclusion of the final task. 

If students are really interested in the task, this could be transformed into a project, involving research and the production of a leaflet or web page in the multi-media centre. 

 

Top 10 Ways to Introduce Vocabulary

Top 10 Ways to Introduce Vocabulary

From Tania Iveson

Teachers often explain new vocabulary to learners. Lexical items can include single words (house), collocations (make a bed) and longer chunks (once in a blue moon).

To illustrate meaning, our default mode is often to give a definition. With definitions, drawbacks include a lack of context, a need to use equally complex terms, and the temptation to provide other meanings of new words.

As teachers, we can add other ways of teaching lexis to our “teaching tool belt.” For students, the method we choose to illustrate is often the key to making the item meaningful and useable. Here are ten ways to illustrate lexis.

1. Synonyms

Using items with a similar meaning can be useful. Adjectives such as intelligent have several synonyms: bright, smart, clever. Phrasal verbs usually have a non-phrasal verb equivalent: go off – explode. Teachers should be wary of saying that items have the same meaning. Often, the meaning is close, but there are differences in formality, connotation, and grammatical usage.

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2. Antonyms

Opposites are a common way to present and learn the meaning of new lexis. At lower levels, items such as rich and poor are obvious examples. Again, teachers should be mindful of making generalizations. Rich people and poor people are opposites, but rich food and poor food are not. Collocations are helpful here. At higher levels, prefixes and suffixes are excellent for vocabulary building through opposites e.g. helpful and unhelpful.

3. Drawing

The most basic sketch or stick figures can provide the perfect medium to illustrate certain items. Some good examples include geographical terms like estuary or peninsular, statistical features of graphs like peak, trough, or go through the roof, and physical terms such as back-to-back. Artistic skills are not required!

4. Points on a scale

A scale is an excellent way to illustrate the meaning of several gradable items at the same time. Common examples include adverbs of frequency: never-rarely-occasionally-sometimes, or adjectives of fear: apprehensive-nervous-scared-terrified. Less common items such as petrified can be added to the scale at higher levels. Where appropriate, teachers can add useful information such as prepositional usage on the scale. For example: nervous about and scared of.

5. Cuisenaire rods

These coloured blocks are wonderful teaching aids, and are especially useful for certain lexical areas. Key examples include prepositions of place: on, under, between, among, comparison of adjectives: bigger than, the smallest, twice as big as. Blocks can also represent items in a narrative to act as a visual aid to comprehension.

6. Pictures

For pre-planned teaching of lexis, taking pictures to class can convey a great deal of lexical information very quickly. Nouns and verbs relating to specific places such as kitchens, airports or offices work well with pictures. Parts of machines or living creatures show well in picture format too. Of course, having internet access in the classroom will provide many pictures through sources like Google images.

7. Mime

Mime, often overlooked by teachers, is extremely effective for many items. Instead of defining proud, fold your arms as if carrying a newborn, puff out your chest and whisper, “My son”. Then ask the class how you feel and provide the word if necessary. Another useful exercise is to mime an everyday routine such as getting ready for work, driving, or preparing a meal. Ask students to jot down any verbs they see. This is an excellent test of recall and a good needs-analysis activity.

8. Sound

Making the sound is a quick and easy illustration of many words: whistle, groan, howl, clear one’s throat, snap your fingers etc. Recordings of sound effects are an evocative way of bringing less familiar lexis into the lesson. Listening to a sequence of sounds such as rustling, scratching, tapping, and tinkling glass provides clear illustration, a need to describe the sound, and an effective way of fixing the concept in the student’s mind.

9. Total physical response (TPR)

Aspects of this approach to language learning can help students take control of new language. After illustrating physical lexis such as stare, peer, glance, and blink, the teacher can ask students to perform the action after the words are given. This can be used for more complex items such as peel an apple and change a tire.

10. Realia

Where practical, bringing the actual item to class provides an unmistakeably clear illustration of an object. This can also provide a useful stimulus to a lesson. On a slightly more ambitious scale, asking students to teach other students how to perform a task using realia can be very motivating and memorable. Examples include how to prepare a salad, how to send a text message using a particular cellphone, and how to play a card game.

This is not an exhaustive list. The most important thing is to anticipate what lexis you might have to clarify and then choose the technique(s) that best helps illustrate meaning.

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Teaching and Developing Vocabulary

Teaching and Developing Vocabulary:

Key to Long-Term Reading Success

JOHN J. PIKULSKI AND SHANE TEMPLETON

The Central Importance of

Vocabulary

It seems almost impossible to overstate the power of

Words; they literally have changed and will

Continue to change the course of world history.

Perhaps the greatest tools we can give students for

Succeeding, not only in their education but more

generally in life, is a large, rich vocabulary and the

skills for using those words. Our ability to function

in today’s complex social and economic worlds is

mightily affected by our language skills and word

knowledge.

In addition to the vital importance of vocabulary

for success in life, a large vocabulary is more

specifically predictive and reflective of high levels of

reading achievement. The Report of the National

Reading Panel (2000), for example, concluded, “The

importance of vocabulary knowledge has long been

recognized in the development of reading skills. As

early as 1924, researchers noted that growth in

reading power relies on continuous growth in word

knowledge” (pp. 4–15).

Vocabulary or Vocabularies?

In everyday conversation we speak of vocabulary in

the singular; we speak of a person’s vocabulary.

This is actually an oversimplification. The American

Heritage Dictionary defines vocabulary as “the sum

of words used by, understood by, or at the

command of a particular person or group.” In this

paper we are concerned with extending the sum of

words that are used by and understood by students.

However, it seems important to point out that in

almost all cases there are some differences in the

number of words that an individual understands

and uses. Even the terms “uses” and “understands”

need clarification. For example, the major way in

which we “use” vocabulary is when we speak and

write; the term expressive vocabulary is used to refer

to both since these are the vocabularies we use to

express ourselves. We “understand” vocabulary

when we listen to speech and when we read; the

term receptive vocabulary is used to refer to listening

and reading vocabularies. Finally, to round out the

terminology, meaning or oral vocabulary refers to the

combination of listening and speaking vocabularies,

and literate vocabulary refers to the combination of

our reading and writing vocabularies. Are our

listening, speaking, reading, and writing

vocabularies all the same? Are they equally large?

Is our meaning vocabulary larger or smaller than

C u r r e n t R e s e a r c h

IN READING / LANGUAGE ARTS

“Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, standing in a dictionary; how potent for good and evil they

become in the hands of one who knows how to choose and combine them.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

2

meaning vocabularies. We tend to have a larger

group of words that we use in reading and writing

than we use in our own speech. This is because

written language is more formal, more complex,

and more sophisticated than spoken language.

Reading Vocabulary

Young children naturally learn to communicate

through listening and speaking. In order to make

the transition to communicating through reading

and writing, they need a large meaning vocabulary

and effective decoding skills. There is an

abundance of research evidence to show that an

effective decoding strategy allows students not only

to identify printed words accurately but to do so

rapidly and automatically (Pikulski and Chard,

2003). Given the focus of this paper, we will not

attempt to review the rather complex topic of

developing fluency. However, we do feel it is

important to briefly address one aspect of decoding

that is crucial for beginning readers: high-frequency

vocabulary.

our literate vocabularies? Figure 1 shows the

relationship of the eight different terms.

For the first five years or so of their lives,

children are involved in the process of acquiring a

meaning/oral vocabulary—words that they

understand when they hear them and that they can

use in their speech. During this period, children

have essentially no literate vocabularies. Most

children acquire reading and writing skills upon

entering school. They need to acquire a basic

knowledge of how printed letters relate to the

sounds of spoken words and how printed words

relate to spoken words. Being able to translate or

transcode print into speech allows children to use

what they know about meaning/oral vocabulary for

their literate vocabulary. So for very young

children, their meaning vocabularies are much

larger than their literate vocabularies.

The acquisition of decoding skills leads to rapid

expansion of literate vocabularies by allowing

children to transcode their meaning vocabularies

into their literate vocabularies. This is so much the

case that for older students and for adults our

literate vocabularies are probably larger than our

Vocabularies

Reading Writing

Expressive

Vocabulary

Literate/Written

Vocabulary

Receptive

Vocabulary

Listening Speaking

Figure 1

Meaning/Oral

Vocabulary

3

potential for fostering improvement in another.

Therefore, one responsibility of teachers is to help

children transfer vocabulary skills from one form to

another.

The Need to Improve

Vocabulary Instruction

While the dependence of both general achievement

and reading achievement on vocabulary growth has

been clearly established for decades, those findings

do not appear to have been put into practice. In a

recent text, Beck et al. (2002) draw the researchbased

conclusion: “All the available evidence

indicates that there is little emphasis on the

acquisition of vocabulary in school curricula.” In a

classic classroom observational study, Durkin (1979)

found that in the 4,469 minutes of reading

instruction that were observed, a mere nineteen

minutes were devoted to vocabulary instruction and

that virtually no vocabulary development

instruction took place during content instruction

such as social studies.

The effects of the lack of attention to vocabulary

instruction, however, may not manifest themselves

in the earliest grades where tests of reading

achievement tend to contain passages that have

simple content and common vocabulary. While

most students who succeed in reading in the early

grades continue to achieve well, some do not. The

Report of the Rand Reading Study Group (2002)

concluded, “Research has shown that many children

who read at the third grade level in grade 3 will not

automatically become proficient comprehenders in

later grades.”

Indeed, a commonly reported phenomenon in

reading test results is for achievement to be good

through second or third grade and to falter

thereafter. This drop off in achievement seems very

likely due to weaknesses in language development

and background knowledge, which are increasingly

required for reading comprehension beyond the

early grades and for reading informational and

content-area texts.

The most recently released study of international

reading achievement provides some strong evidence

that the weakness in U.S. student performance is

not the result of decoding problems or inability to

comprehend narrative texts. Instead, it seems to be

due to weakness in ability to comprehend

High-frequency vocabulary refers to those words

that are used over and over again in our

communications—they are important to both our

meaning and literate vocabularies. Amere 100

words make up about 50% of most English texts;

200 words make up 90% of the running words of

materials through third grade; and 500 words make

up 90% of the running words in materials through

ninth grade. If a reader is to have at least a

modicum of fluency, it is critical that these words be

taught systematically and effectively.

The research of Ehri (1994, 1998) is particularly

informative. Her research strongly suggests that

high-frequency words should be introduced without

written context so that students focus on their visual

composition, that they should be practiced in

materials that are at an appropriate level of challenge,

and that they should be practiced several times in

order to allow developing readers to recognize them

instantly or, in other words, at sight. She also makes

the important point that although many of these

words do not conform completely to phonic

generalizations or expectations (e.g. was), they

nonetheless very frequently do have elements that

are regular. For example, the w in was is regular and

the s at the end of that word sometimes does have the

/z/ sound. Ehri’s research strongly suggests that

these phonic regularities are powerful mnemonics for

remembering the words and should be pointed out,

rather than expecting that students will remember

the vague shape of the word, as was the tradition

with flash-card instruction for many years.

The High But Less Than Perfect

Relationship Among the Vocabularies

There is no question that people who have large

speaking vocabularies generally tend to have large

listening, reading, and writing vocabularies; likewise

people who are limited in one of these aspects

are likely limited in other aspects as well. We have

seen that this close relationship does not exist in preliterate

children. Also, some children who develop

large reading vocabularies may not use that vocabulary

in their writing without teacher help and guidance.

However, in the years during which children

develop as readers and writers, there is an increasingly

high relationship among all four aspects of

vocabulary—listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Fostering improvement in one aspect has the

concluded that although these children were

exposed to much oral language stimulation in

school, it was too incidental and insufficiently direct

and intense to have a major impact.

A Comprehensive Approach to

Teaching and Developing

Vocabulary

The amount of vocabulary that children need to

acquire each year is staggering in scope, estimated

to be about 3,000 words a year. Therefore, a

comprehensive approach consisting of the following

components needs to be in place.

• Use “instructional” read-aloud events.

• Provide direct instruction in the meanings of

clusters of words and individual words.

• Systematically teach students the meaning of

prefixes, suffixes, and root words.

• Link spelling instruction to reading and

vocabulary instruction.

• Teach the effective, efficient, realistic use of

dictionaries, thesauruses, and other reference

works.

• Teach, model, and encourage the application of

a word-learning strategy.

• Encourage wide reading.

• Create a keen awareness of and a deep interest

in language and words.

Use Instructional

Read-Aloud Events

The recommendation that parents and teachers read

aloud to children is among the most popular recommendations

in the field of reading. The prestigious

research-based report Becoming a Nation of Readers

(Anderson et al. 1985) concluded, “The single most

important activity for building the knowledge

required for eventual success in reading is reading

aloud to children.” One very obvious way in which

reading aloud to children can be expected to be beneficial

is to increase their language and vocabulary

skills. Indeed there is research to support this position

(Elley, 1989; Leong and Pikulski, 1990; Robbins

and Ehri, 1994).

4

informational texts (Progress in International Reading

Literacy Study, 2003). When compared to students

from the 35 participating nations, United States

fourth graders ranked fourth on the narrative

section of the test but thirteenth on the

informational section. This disparity of nine

rankings was by far the largest among the nations

participating in the study.

Vocabulary and Language

Development: The Important

Preschool Years

Scarborough (2001) reviews very convincing

evidence that children who enter kindergarten with

weak language skills are likely to encounter

difficulty in learning to read. Hart and Risley (1995)

conducted a careful, intensive study of early

language development and found huge differences

that reflected parents’ socioeconomic status.

Extraordinary variation was found in the amount of

talk that took place between parents and children

from family to family. At the extremes, the children

from high socioeconomic status had 16 times more

language stimulation than children from lower

status families. These differences in language

experiences directly influenced children’s language

growth. Children from parents of professionals had

a cumulative vocabulary of about 1,100 words,

those from working class families had about 650

words, and those from welfare families had just

over 400 words. These differences systematically

widened between the onset of speech and three

years of age when the vocabulary measures were

taken.

More recently Farcus (2001) presented similar

research data. He found that once children who

were falling behind in language growth entered

kindergarten, with its greater language stimulation,

the language gap no longer widened. Nevertheless,

although the gap didn’t widen, neither did it

narrow.

Research reviews such as that by Barnett (2001)

suggest that it is possible for children who are behind

in early language development to overcome these

limitations. However, reviews such as that by Beck

et al. (2002) and Juel et al. (2003) clearly show that

not enough is being done in our school programs to

help children who enter school with weak language

and vocabulary development to catch up. Juel et al.

5

jargon of a field. Examples of Level III words

from the field of reading instruction include the

terms digraph, diphthong, schwa, metacomprehension,

etc. As one might expect, some words such as

calculation might be classified as either a Level II

or Level III word or both.

Level IV Words These are words that are

interesting but so rare and esoteric that they are

probably not useful even in most educational

environments, and they are not associated with a

field of study or profession. Examples are words

that were but no longer are used: majuscule (a

capital letter), xanthodont (one who has yellow

teeth like a rodent), noctuary (an account of what

happens in a night). Notice, however, that some

Level IV words are useful for teaching

morphological clues such as noct meaning

“night” and dont or dent referring to teeth. Level

IV words are also helpful for creating an interest

in words and language.

Just by their definitions, it should be apparent

that a major responsibility of teachers is to expand

the Level II and Level III words of their students.

Teachers of content areas have a special

responsibility for teaching Level III words.

Purposes For Teaching Vocabulary One reason

teachers are concerned about teaching vocabulary is

to facilitate the comprehension of a text that

students will be assigned to read. If students do not

know the meaning of many of the words that they

will encounter in a text, their comprehension of that

selection is likely to be compromised. When the

purpose of vocabulary instruction is to facilitate the

comprehension of a selection, it is obvious that this

instruction must take place as an introduction

before the reading of the selection.

As a rule, new words in narrative selections are

not as critical to the overall understanding of the

selection as are new words in informational

selections. Before guiding students’ reading of a

particular narrative, teachers should determine if

there are any new words that represent concepts

that are critical to understanding the selection and

which are not adequately defined in context. If

there are, then these words should be presented and

discussed before the students read. While a

“narrow” or superficial treatment often is sufficient

for these, on other occasions it is necessary to

develop “deep” understandings.

The study by Elley (1989) strongly suggested that

vocabulary growth was much greater when teachers

discussed, even if briefly, the meanings of the words

in addition to just reading the books aloud. The

recent study by Juel et al. (2003) showed that while

teachers in kindergarten and first grade spent

considerable time reading and discussing books to

children with below average vocabularies, these

activities had minimal impact on the progress of the

children. Only when teachers spent focused time on

the vocabulary did significant growth occur. We

apply the term “instructional read aloud” to readaloud

events where, in addition to reading aloud to

stimulate an interest in books and reading, there is

also a deliberate teaching of skills that will promote

independence in reading, such as an increased

vocabulary.

Provide Direct Instruction in the

Meanings of Words

Which words should be taught? In deciding which

words to teach we have found it helpful to think

about “levels” of vocabulary, which is similar to

what Beck et al. (2002) refer to as “tiers” of

vocabulary.

Level I Words These are words that are used

over and over in everyday speech. Since they are

so frequently used in a variety of contexts,

virtually all children learn them. Some examples

of these words would be house, girl, cat, up,

umbrella, etc. Level I words are sometimes

referred to as “conversational speech.” Children

who are learning English as a second language

will sometimes make progress with this level of

vocabulary but have difficulty making progress

with words at levels beyond this one.

Level II Words These are words that are likely to

be learned only through reading or through

instruction. They have been referred to as the

vocabulary of educated persons, as “academic

vocabulary,” and as “instructional vocabulary.”

They are words that are necessary for general

success in school. Words such as perspective,

generate, initiate, intermediate, calculation, etc. are

possible examples.

Level III Words These are words associated with

a particular field of study or profession. These

words make up the technical vocabulary or

Systematically Teach the Meaning of

Prefixes, Suffixes, and Root Words

The majority of English words have been created

through the combination of morphemic elements,

that is, prefixes and suffixes with base words and

word roots. If learners understand how this

combinatorial process works, they possess one of

the most powerful understandings necessary for

vocabulary growth (Anderson and Freebody, 1981).

This understanding of how meaningful elements

combine is defined as morphological knowledge

because it is based on an understanding of

morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in a

language. In the intermediate grades and beyond,

most new words that students encounter in their

reading are morphological derivatives of familiar

words (Aronoff, 1994). In recent years research has

suggested some promising guidelines for teaching

the meanings of prefixes, suffixes, and word roots as

well as for the ways in which knowledge of these

meaningful word parts may be applied (Templeton,

2004). Word roots such as dict, spect, and struct are

meaningful parts of words that remain after all

prefixes and suffixes have been removed but that

usually do not stand by themselves as words:

prediction, inspection, contract.

In the primary grades students begin to explore

the effects of prefixes such as un-, re-, and dis- on

base words. In the intermediate grades students

continue to explore prefixes and an increasing

number of suffixes and their effects on base words:

govern (verb) + -ment = government (noun).

Common Greek and Latin roots begin to be

explored, along with the effects of prefixes and

suffixes that attach to them (Templeton, 1989).

These include, for example, chron (“time,” as in

chronology), tele (“distant, far” as in television), and

fract (“break,” as in fracture). Alarge proportion of

the vocabulary of specific content areas is built on

Greek and Latin elements. As this morphological

knowledge develops, teachers can model how it

may be applied to determining the meanings of

unfamiliar words encountered in print.

6

Informational selections usually carry a higher

load of new words than narratives, and the

meanings of these new words are quite often

important for understanding the selection. Some

authors of informational texts make it a point to use

artificially enhanced contexts to facilitate word

learning. If new words are defined appropriately in

the selection, they may not need to be discussed

beforehand. However, it is important to keep in

mind the research finding that in naturally

occurring contexts, it is more difficult to use

contexts for word meanings in informational texts

as compared to narrative texts. Thus new words

that are critical to an understanding of the major

topic or theme should be introduced and discussed

prior to reading because the exploration of these

prerequisite terms and concepts will establish a

strong foundation for subsequent learning.

Asecond major reason for teaching the meaning

of words is to increase the number of words that

students know and can use in a variety of

educational, social, and eventually work-related

areas. These are very likely to be what we have

termed Level II words. To increase the number of

words the students learn, it is often helpful to teach

these words in morphological or semantic clusters.

Morphological clusters refer to what Nagy calls

“the word formation process.” These clusters will

often build around a base or root word. For

example, if a teacher were teaching the word arm

not as a body part but as a verb meaning “to

provide with a weapon,” then it would probably be

useful to teach the morphologically related words:

arms (noun), armed (adjective as in armed guard),

disarm, rearm, unarm, armor, armory, armament, etc.

Semantic clusters refer to words that are related

in meaning or relate to the same field of study.

Teaching words in semantic clusters is particularly

effective since vocabulary expansion involves not

just the acquisition of the meaning of individual

words but also learning the relationships among

words and how these words relate to each other.

Avery effective way to present semantically

related words is to build word webs around some

central concept. For example, after reading the

selection Akiak, a story about dog sled racing in

Alaska, it would be appropriate to build a word

web of “cold weather words.”

Link Spelling Instruction to Reading

and Vocabulary Instruction

Spelling knowledge applies not only to the ability to

encode words during writing; importantly, it also

underlies individuals’ ability to decode words during

the process of reading (Templeton, 2003a, 2003b).

Students’ spelling knowledge is, therefore, a

powerful foundation for their reading and their

vocabulary development. This latter aspect is

linked to the role that morphological knowledge

plays, as discussed in the previous section. Words

that are related in meaning are often related in

spelling, despite changes in sound.

Among intermediate students, examination of

how spelling patterns reflect meaning leads to

vocabulary growth. To get a sense of how the

connection works between spelling and meaning,

examine the following words: bomb/ bombard;

muscle/muscular; compete/competition. Because the

words in each pair are related in meaning, the

spelling of the underlined sounds remains constant;

although the sound that letters represent may

change in related words, the spelling usually

remains the same because it preserves the meaning

relationship that these words share.

Once students understand the spelling-meaning

relationships among words, they can learn how the

spelling or structure of familiar words can be clues

to the spelling and the meaning of unknown words,

and vice-versa. For example, a student who spells

condemn as condem in her spontaneous writing may

be shown the word condemnation: This not only

explains the so-called “silent” n in condemn but

expands the student’s vocabulary at the same time.

Teach the Use of Dictionaries,

Thesauruses, and Other Reference

Works

Exploring dictionary entries can be one important

and effective component of understanding a word

deeply. The entries can also help students

determine the precise meaning of a word.

Dictionaries can also provide helpful information

about the history of a word and reinforce the

interrelationships among words in the same

meaning “families.” For example, a discussion of

run-on entries illustrates how one word’s entry can

7

include information about related words—the entry

for entrap also includes entraps and entrapment. The

usage notes in dictionaries often explain subtle but

important differences among words—usually the

appropriateness of one word over another in a

particular context. Words for which the dictionary

is essential may be entered in a student’s vocabulary

notebook. Dictionaries can also contribute to an

interest in and attitudes toward words that teachers

and the students explore.

The usage notes in dictionaries reflect a powerful

and consistent research finding: every

word/concept we know, and the degree to which

we really know it, depends on the relationship of

that word/concept to other words/concepts. The

thesaurus, another resource for word learning, also

helps learners make fine distinctions among

concepts and words. This differentiation of learners’

conceptual domains is the essence of vocabulary

development and growth.

Teach the Application of a Word

Learning Strategy

As noted earlier, written texts contain richer

vocabulary and, therefore, more opportunities for

expansion of vocabulary through reading as

compared to the word challenge in oral language.

However, the probability of learning a new word’s

meaning through encountering it in reading is not

high—only about one chance in twenty. There is

research that shows that students can be taught

strategic behaviors to improve their ability to learn

the meaning of words (Kuhn and Stahl, 1998).

While skills such as application of morphological

clues, reference works, and spelling clues to word

meanings are all useful, they become more powerful

and functional when combined with the use of

context clues in a deliberate strategy.

Based on a review of research and our experience

in working with students, we suggest the following

sequence:

Step 1: Carefully look at the word; decide how

to pronounce it. Carefully processing the letters

or chunks of letters of a word and thinking about

the sounds for them will leave a memory trace

for the word even if it is not a word that the

reader knows. At very least, it is likely that if the

reader encounters the word again in future

readings, there will be at least a modicum of

familiarity with it.

8

morphological clues. Nevertheless, it seems

useful to take the step of making a best guess at

the word’s meaning since this further mental

activity is likely to make the word more familiar

the next time it is encountered—even if the

student’s understanding of the word has to be

revised.

Step 4a: If you don’t have a good idea as to the

word’s meaning and if the word seems

important, use a dictionary or glossary. We

suggest two touchstones for determining

whether or not a word is important. First, if the

reader is beginning to have difficulty

understanding what he or she is reading, the

meaning of the word may contribute to a better

understanding of what is being read. It is,

therefore, important. Second, if it is a word that

the reader has encountered before and still has

no good idea as to its meaning, it is probably an

important word since it is likely to be

encountered again in the future.

Step 2a: Look around the word for context clues,

including:

• Look within the sentence.

• Reread previous sentences.

• Read ahead for more context clues.

Step 2b: Look in the word for prefixes and

suffixes, base words, and root words that might

offer clues.We have listed this and the previous

step as 2a and 2b because with experience

students will apply one or the other first

depending on the word. For a word with a

common prefix such as un-, morphological clues

would likely be used before the use of context

clues. The hallmark of a strategic reader is the

flexible application of strategies.

Step 3: Make your best guess at the word’s

meaning. It is important to stress with students

that natural context most often will not lead to a

clear understanding of a word’s meaning and

that some words will not contain recognizable

Carefully look at the word; decide how to pronounce it.

Make your best guess at the word’s meaning.

If you don’t have a good idea as to

the word’s meaning and if the word

seems important, use a dictionary or

a glossary.

If you think you have figured out

the meaning of the word or if the

word doesn’t seem important,

keep reading

Strategy for Deriving Word Meanings

Figure 2

Look around the word for

context clues.

• Look within the sentence.

• Reread previous sentences.

• Read ahead for more clues.

Look in the word.

• Look for prefixes and suffixes.

• Look for base words.

• Look for root words.

9

Step 4b: If you think you have figured out the

meaning of the word or if the word doesn’t seem

important, keep reading. It would be unrealistic

to tell a reader to look up every unknown word

in a dictionary; mature readers don’t. Therefore,

it is legitimate to move on and keep reading if

context and morphological clues have been

somewhat helpful or if the word doesn’t seem to

be important for comprehension of what is being

read or for adding to one’s functional vocabulary.

Teachers need to strategically and flexibly model

and teach each of the above steps. Eventually, as

students mature in their reading skills, they can and

will internalize the steps in this strategy.

Application of these steps then becomes much

smoother and more automatic, requiring less

attention. In fact, good readers usually “blend”

these steps.

Encourage Wide Reading

The importance of wide reading in the growth of

students’ vocabulary is critical (Nagy and

Anderson, 1984). Given the staggering number of

new words that children must add to their

vocabularies each year, it would be impossible to

directly teach all of them; Anderson (1996) estimates

that it would require teaching about twenty new

words a day each day of the school year!

Through wide independent reading, students

come in contact with vocabulary that rarely occurs

in spoken language but that is much more likely to

be encountered in printed language. Cunningham

and Stanovich (1998) present evidence that

vocabulary used in oral communication such as

television shows or adult conversation is extremely

restricted. For example, prime time television

shows have less challenging vocabulary than

children’s books, and college graduates talking with

friends and spouses use vocabulary that is less

challenging than that in preschool books!

Create a Keen Awareness of and a

Deep Interest in Language and Words

Research reviewed earlier in this paper clearly

shows that some children enter school with many

more language skills than others. It seems reasonable

to suggest that they also come with varying

degrees of interest in words. Therefore, it is important

that every teacher attempt to develop such an

interest. It seems important that every teacher be

interested in words themselves. We highly recommend

that each teacher reading this paper go to the

website www.wordsmith.org and become a certified

“Linguaphile” (one who loves language!). At no

cost, it is possible to join over a half million linguaphiles

who receive a word a day in their e-mail.

Other excellent websites are www.wordcentral.com

and http://pw1.netcom.com/~rlederer/rllink.htm.

We also recommend that every teacher develop a

“word-a-day” routine wherein there is a focus on an

interesting, challenging word. These words should

be introduced and discussed; students should be

encouraged to look for them and use them in and

out of school. If a word a day seems too fast a pace,

a word every other day or even a word a week will

still be beneficial. Again, the main purpose is to

create an interest in words; a secondary but highly

important purpose is to teach the meaning of the

words themselves. In the beginning of the year the

teacher will probably need to select the words, but

later students should be encouraged to nominate

the words.

As students continue to explore and think about

words, they can be encouraged to keep vocabulary

notebooks in which they jot down interesting words

they come across in their reading (Bear, Invernizzi,

Templeton, and Johnston, 2004). As they become

comfortable with this technique, they can add

information to each word as appropriate—recording

the sentence in which it occurred so they gain a

sense of the context in which it is used, its word

parts and their meaning, and the appropriate

dictionary definition.

Students’ interest and curiosity about words are

also stimulated when they learn the logic behind

word origins and the many stories that underlie

how words came about and came to mean what

they do. And it is also important to realize that

learning these aspects about words reveals that

words are not only interesting—words are also fun!

For example, most intermediate students love the

Sniglets by Rich Hall (1984). Asniglet is “any word

that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should.”

For example, detruncus (de trunk‘ us): The

embarrassing phenomenon of losing one’s bathing

shorts while diving into a swimming pool.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, R.C. (1996). Research foundations to

support wide reading. In Creany, V. (Ed.), Promoting

reading in developing countries, 55–77. Newark, DE:

International Reading Association.

Anderson, R.C., and Freebody, P. (1981). Vocabulary

knowledge. In J. Guthrie (Ed.), Comprehension and

teaching: Research reviews, 77–117. Newark, DE:

International Reading Association.

Anderson, R.C., Hiebert, E. H., Scott, J.A., and

Wilkerson, I.A. (1985). Becoming a nation of readers.

Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education.

Aronoff, M. (1994). Morphology. In A. C. Purves, L.

Papa, and S. Jordan (Eds.), Encyclopedia of English

studies and language arts, Vol. 2, 820–821. New York:

Scholastic.

Barnett, W. S. (2001). Preschool education for

economically disadvantaged children: Effects on

reading achievement and related outcomes. In S.

Neuman and D. Dickenson (Eds.), Handbook of early

literacy research, 421–443. New York: Guilford Press.

Bear, D.R., Ivernizzi, M., Templeton, S., and

Johnston, F. (2004) Words their way: Word study for

phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction. Upper

Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/Prentice Hall.

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., and Kucan, L. (2002).

Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction.

New York: Guilford.

Corson, D. (1997). The learning and use of academic

English words. Language Learning, 47, 671–718.

Cunningham, A.E. and Stanovich, K.E. (1998).

What reading does for the mind. American Educator,

Summer, 8–15.

Durkin, D. (1979). What classroom instruction has

to say about reading comprehension instruction.

Reading Research Quarterly, 14, 481–533.

Ehri, L.C. (1994). Development of the ability to read

words: Update. In R. Ruddell, M. Ruddell, and H.

Singer (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of

reading (4th ed.), 323–358. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Conclusions

It does seem hard to overstate the importance of

vocabulary—not only for reading achievement but

also for general social and economic success. The

early years of a child’s life have a profound

influence on that child’s language and vocabulary

development, which in turn greatly influences

school success. Children who live in poverty in

their early years have much less verbal interaction

with their parents and consequently begin school

with far less vocabulary development than their

more privileged peers. While the language gap

doesn’t widen once children from lower

socioeconomic backgrounds enter the stimulating

environment of school, that gap does not narrow.

Research suggests that it may not narrow because

the vocabulary instruction offered is not sufficiently

intense or effective.

Research is clear regarding implications for

instruction that will ensure the development of

large, useful vocabularies: wide reading plays a

critical role in developing knowledge, and teachers

facilitate this process by teaching strategies for

learning words independently, including teaching

morphological units, the use of dictionaries and

other reference works, and exploring the link

between spelling and learning words. Teachers

should also directly teach important specific words,

and they should develop and sustain students’

interest in and curiosity about words.

10

Ehri, L.C. (1998). Grapheme-phoneme knowledge is

essential for learning to read words in English. In

J.L. Metsala and L.C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in

beginning literacy, 3–40. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Elley, W. B. (1989). Vocabulary acquisition from

listening to stories. Reading Research Quarterly, 24,

174–187.

Farcus, G. (2001). Family linguistic, cultural and

social reproduction. ERIC ED 453 910.

Hart, B., and Risley, T.R. (1995). Meaningful

differences in the everyday experience of young American

children. Baltimore, MD: Paul Brooks Publishing.

Juel, C. Biancarosa, G., Coker, D., and Deffes, R.

(2003). Walking with Rosie: Acautionary tale of

early reading instruction. Educational Leadership,

April, 13–18.

Kuhn, M.R., and Stahl, S.A. (1998). Teaching

children to learn word meanings from context: A

synthesis and some questions. Journal of Literacy

Research, 30, 119–138.

Leong, C.B., and Pikulski, J.J. (1990). Incidental

learning of word meanings. In J. Zutel and X.

McCormick (Eds.), Thirty-ninth Yearbook of the

National Reading Conference, 231–240. Chicago:

National Reading Conference.

Nagy, W.E., and Anderson, R.C. (1984). How many

words are there in printed school English? Reading

Research Quarterly, 19, 304–330.

National Reading Panel. (2000). Report of the

National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read.

Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Child Health

and Human Development.

Pikulski, J.J., and Chard, D.J. (2003). Fluency: Bridge

from decoding to reading comprehension. Boston, MA:

Houghton Mifflin Company.

Progress in International Reading/Literacy Study. (2003).

www.pirls.org.

Rand Reading Study Group. (2002). Reading for

understanding: Towards an R&D program in reading

comprehension.

www.rand.org/multi/achievementforall

Robbins, C., and Ehri, L.C. (1994). Reading

storybooks to kindergarteners helps them learn new

vocabulary words. Journal of Educational Psychology,

85, 54–64.

Scarborough, H. (2001). Connecting early language

to later reading (dis)abilities. In S. Neuman and D.

Dickenson (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research,

97–110. New York: Guilford Press.

Templeton, S. (1989). Tacit and explicit knowledge of

derivational morphology: Foundations for a unified

approach to spelling and vocabulary development

in the intermediate grades and beyond. Reading

Psychology, 10, 233–253.

Templeton, S. (2003a). Spelling. In J. Flood, D. Lapp,

J. Squire, and J. M. Jensen (Eds.), Handbook of research

on teaching the English language arts (2nd ed.),

738–751. Mahwah, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates.

Templeton, S. (2003b). Teaching of spelling. In J.

Guthrie (Senior Ed.), Encyclopedia of education (2nd

ed.), 2302–2305. New York: Macmillan.

Templeton, S. (2004). The vocabulary-spelling

connection: Orthographic development and

morphological knowledge at the intermediate

grades and beyond. In J. Baumann and E. Kameenui

(Eds.), Vocabulary instruction, 118–138. New York:

Guilford Press.

Thorndike, E.L. (1971). Reading as reasoning: A

study of mistakes in paragraph reading. Reading

Research Quarterly, 6, 425–434. (Originally published

in 1917)

11

12

John J. Pikulski

John Pikulski is Professor of

Education at the University

of Delaware, where he has been

Director of the Reading Center,

Department Chairperson, and

President of the University

Faculty Senate. He has served as

a reading and psychological consultant to

numerous school districts and reading and

governmental agencies throughout North

America. His current research interests focus on

strategies for preventing reading problems and the

teaching and developing of vocabulary. An active

member in the International Reading Association,

Dr. Pikulski has served on its Board of Directors,

chaired various committees, contributed a monthly

column to its journal, and was president of the

association in 1997–98. He is the coauthor of The

Diagnosis, Correction, and Prevention of Reading

Disabilities and Informal Reading Inventories, and

has been inducted into the prestigious Reading

Hall of Fame. Dr. Pikulski is a senior author of

Houghton Mifflin Reading.

Shane Templeton

Shane Templeton is Foundation

Professor of Curriculum and

Instruction at the University of

Nevada, Reno. Dr. Templeton’s

research has focused on

developmental word knowledge

in elementary, middle, and high

school students. His books include Children’s

Literacy: Contexts for Meaningful Learning and

Teaching the Integrated Language Arts. He is

coauthor of Words Their Way: Word Study for

Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction.

Dr. Templeton is the senior author of Houghton

Mifflin Spelling and Vocabulary and an author of

Houghton Mifflin English and Houghton Mifflin

Reading. Since 1987, Dr. Templeton has been a

member of the Usage Panel of The American

Heritage Dictionary.

Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Litho in U.S.A. SHA15M1203 G-23748

800-733-2828 www.eduplace.com

Authors

 

Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills

Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills

Students often think that the ability to speak a language is the product of language learning, but speaking is also a crucial part of the language learning process. Effective instructors teach students speaking strategies — using minimal responses, recognizing scripts, and using language to talk about language — that they can use to help themselves expand their knowledge of the language and their confidence in using it. These instructors help students learn to speak so that the students can use speaking to learn.

1. Using minimal responses

Language learners who lack confidence in their ability to participate successfully in oral interaction often listen in silence while others do the talking. One way to encourage such learners to begin to participate is to help them build up a stock of minimal responses that they can use in different types of exchanges. Such responses can be especially useful for beginners.

Minimal responses are predictable, often idiomatic phrases that conversation participants use to indicate understanding, agreement, doubt, and other responses to what another speaker is saying. Having a stock of such responses enables a learner to focus on what the other participant is saying, without having to simultaneously plan a response.

2. Recognizing scripts

Some communication situations are associated with a predictable set of spoken exchanges — a script. Greetings, apologies, compliments, invitations, and other functions that are influenced by social and cultural norms often follow patterns or scripts. So do the transactional exchanges involved in activities such as obtaining information and making a purchase. In these scripts, the relationship between a speaker’s turn and the one that follows it can often be anticipated.

Instructors can help students develop speaking ability by making them aware of the scripts for different situations so that they can predict what they will hear and what they will need to say in response. Through interactive activities, instructors can give students practice in managing and varying the language that different scripts contain.

3. Using language to talk about language

Language learners are often too embarrassed or shy to say anything when they do not understand another speaker or when they realize that a conversation partner has not understood them. Instructors can help students overcome this reticence by assuring them that misunderstanding and the need for clarification can occur in any type of interaction, whatever the participants’ language skill levels. Instructors can also give students strategies and phrases to use for clarification and comprehension check.

By encouraging students to use clarification phrases in class when misunderstanding occurs, and by responding positively when they do, instructors can create an authentic practice environment within the classroom itself. As they develop control of various clarification strategies, students will gain confidence in their ability to manage the various communication situations that they may encounter outside the classroom.

 

Learning Disabilities in Adult Education

Learning Disabilities in Adult Education

Research and Evaluation | Noteworthy Practices | Additional Links

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services Rehabilitative Services Administration defines learning disabilities as:

·         A disorder in one or more of the central nervous system processes involved in perceiving, understanding, and/or using concepts through verbal (spoken or written) language or non-verbal means.

·         This disorder manifests itself with a deficit in one or more of the following areas: attention, reasoning, processing, memory, communication, reading, writing, spelling, calculation, coordination, social competence, and emotional maturity.

Research and Evaluation

·         Putting Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read. A teacher’s guide provided for using the findings of the National Reading Panel, with a focus on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.

·         Rethinking Learning Disabilities PDF (531 KB). A comprehensive overview of 20 years of research on learning disabilities by the National Institutes for Health, and recommendations about a new approaches.

·         The Partnership for Reading’s Research-Based Principles for Adult Basic Education Reading Instruction represents the best information available about how adults learn to read.

·         Fast Facts: Strategies for Working with Adult Students with Learning Differences from the Pennsylvania Bureau of Adult Basic & Literacy Education, the site provides concise fact sheets on a variety of topics related to learning differences in adults. Updated and added to regularly.

·         How Many Adults Really Have Learning Disabilities? examines the incidence of adults with learning disabilities, including why it is difficult to determine the scope of the problem.

·         Vision for an Ideal System: Improving Services to Adults with Learning Disabilities. PDF (335 KB) presents a paradigm, developed by a focus group, for providing services to adult education program participants who have learning disabilities.

Noteworthy Practices

·         Bridges to Practice Manual is designed to help state programs implement reforms addressing the needs of adults with learning disabilities. Forty-six states have used this manual to train instructors. See Florida’s Bridges to Practice effort.

·         Arkansas Adult Learning Resource Center identifies, evaluates and disseminates materials on adult education and literacy and offers specific training in teaching adults with learning disabilities.

·         Illinois’ Center on Resources for Teaching and Learning provides information and resources on teaching and learning, including a number of training programs to help educators reach adult learners with disabilities.

·         Washington State Learning Disabilities Quality Initiative: The Washington Learning Disabilities Quality Initiative focuses on how to implement a success pathway for students suspected of having Learning Disabilities.

·         Vermont’s Stern Center provides direct literacy services to children and adults with learning disabilities (including physical disabilities that impair learning), trains teachers, and conducts research.

Additional Links

·         International Dyslexia Association (formerly The Orton Dyslexia Society) is an international membership organization which serves as a clearinghouse of information for professionals, dyslexics, and parents of dyslexics.

·         LD Online. An interactive guide to learning disabilities for parents, teachers and other professionals.

·         Learning Disabilities Association of America. A membership organization for professionals, adults with learning disabilities, and parents of children with learning disabilities.

·         National Association for Adults with Special Learning Needs offers members a centralized hub of information, professional development, technical assistance, communication on issues and trends, and advocacy initiatives on behalf of adults with special learning needs.

·         National Institute for Literacy. An independent federal agency concerned with ensuring that adult literacy services in the U.S. are of the highest possible quality. Also see NIFL Special Collections on Learning Disabilities.

·         AHEAD “From Screening to Accommodation: Providing Services to Adults with Learning Disabilities.” A Manual for Disability Service Providers, Association on Higher Education and Disabilities.

·         GED. For the requirements of “proof of disability” for the GED, see “How to request tests accommodations using the Form L-15.”

 

How to Improve Your Vocabulary Steadily

How to Improve Your Vocabulary Steadily

Sylvia Grappone says, “An article on how to improve vocabulary would be helpful. I’m in my late 30s and noticed that I can no longer remember things as easily as I did when I was a teen, and with a hubby and kids have no time to really focus on studying. I do read in my leisure time but at the moment only technical books. Would reading novels help my vocabulary? Any shortcuts or techniques?”

Sylvia, the more you read, the more words you’ll see, and the more you’ll understand. Even in the Oxford English Dictionary, the final authority for the meaning of a word is how the word has actually been used in print.

But since your family limits your time, let me suggest some ways to improve your vocabulary that are more efficient than reading every book in the library.

1. Make it a priority to learn new words. If you want to improve your vocabulary more quickly, you have to make at least a small commitment. Decide to learn one new word every day or two. Visit Daily Writing Tips for our Word of the Day. Or subscribe to a Word of the Day email list, install a Word of the Day tool on your computer desktop, or buy a Word of the Day calendar.
2. Make your vocabulary practical. Start by learning the words that can express what’s most important to you. For example, learn more of your trade language – the words that are commonly used in your business or hobby or vocation. Go beyond the jargon and cliches. Find better, fresher, clearer words to express what your peers are talking about.
3. Find the right word for you and use it. When you’re writing something, use a thesaurus frequently. That will help you express yourself better. And every time you do that, you’ll learn a new word and you’ll use that new word.
4. Start learning where you are. As you read, if you come across an interesting word that you don’t understand, don’t just bleep over it. See item number 1. Take the time to look it up in a dictionary. Write it down and use it later.
5. Learn roots. Most English words are built from common roots, prefixes and suffixes, often with Greek or Latin origins. They’re highly reusable. When you learn one root, you’ll start to understand the many other words that use that root.
6. When you learn a word, use it immediately and frequently. Make it a game. Slip your new word into conversation with as many different people as you can. Repeat it to yourself. Use it in sentences. Write it on a flashcard and practice it while waiting for red lights.

The key to a better vocabulary is regular practice and progress. Maybe you can’t learn a hundred new words a day, but you can learn one or two a day, totaling thousands of new words over the years.