Fill Your Head With Words

Over the course of our marathon of academic language trainings, a handful of people raised concerns about teaching vocabulary. When it comes to teaching academic language, key vocabulary is probably one of the first places that people turn to. I think it's a good way into thinking about how language gets used in a content area, but we cannot address vocabulary the way many of us were taught. Like many people, I recall English and French classes where I got a list of words to learn and memorize for a spelling and vocab test. Being the good little student I was, I'd go home and toil away to learn the words, I'd look them up in the dictionary, write definitions, devise sentences for each word, and I amassed a collection A's for a job well done. I enjoyed the challenge, and I had rich in-school literacies to rely on, habits and strategies that my librarian parents instilled, that school reinforced. I didn't memorize the words and definitions out of context. Maybe that works to learn them long enough to pass the test but, for most people, that's not going to help retain the words. Instead, we need to help students develop a web of meaning to latch new vocabulary onto.

The following ideas I've drawn from Beck et al.'s (2000) Bringing Words to Life*. The aim of their approach is to engage students in: 1) active thinking about word meanings, 2) active thinking about how to use the words in different situations, and 3) active thinking about the relationships among words.

Just providing information or definitions does not result in deep or sustained knowledge of a word. Two essential things to keep in mind:

1) Make word meanings explicit and clear. One way to do this is to develop student-friendly explanations and create instructional contexts for discussing word meanings.

Student-friendly explanations:
--Characterize the word and how it is typically used. Ask yourself, when do I use this word particularly? Why do we have such a word?
--Explain the meaning in everyday, accessible language.

Instructional contexts, as opposed to natural contexts, are those that have been developed with the intention to provide strong clues to a word’s meaning. Helping students to derive meaning using these context clues might be done through modeling or probing questions to scaffold students’ thinking.
For example, consider the following instructional context and follow up questions: “The deer would be able to eat all that they wanted in the meadow, for there was an abundance of grass.”
• Why would the deer be able to eat all they wanted?
• How much grass must be in the meadow?
• So, what do you think abundance means?

2) Get students actively involved in thinking about and using the meanings immediately. Here's some activities to engage students in thinking about word meanings:

• Word Associations: After presenting explanations for words (eg. accomplice, virtuoso, philanthropist, novice), ask students to associate new words with a presented word or phrase, such as:

What word goes with crook?
Which word goes with gift to build a new hospital?
Which word goes with piano?
Which word goes with kindergartner?
Then ask students to explain their reasoning. Why did they decide on the connection they made?

• Have You Ever…? For this activity, students clap to indicate how much they would like (not at all, a little bit, a lot) to be described by the target words. And, why they would feel that way.

• Idea Completions: In contrast to traditional “write a sentence using the vocabulary word, provide sentence stems that require students to integrate a word’s meaning into a context to explain the situation. For example:

The audience asked the virtuoso to play another piece of music because…
The skiing teacher said Martha was a novice on the ski slopes because…
d) Ask questions such as the following with the newly introduced words:
When might you…? How might you…? Why might you…?

_________
Beck, I. L, McKeown, M. G, & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction. New York: Guilford Press