Macy Bombard
Aptitude Hypothesis: Signal importance of reading aloud to children and immersing them in written language
Knowledge Hypothesis: Signal importance of reading aloud to children and immersing them in written language
Instrumental Hypothesis: If word meanings are taught well, students will find comprehending material to be much easier
Vocabulary: the words we use, recognize, and respond to in meaningful acts of communication
Components of vocabulary: Listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The components act as a continuum. A child’s first vocabulary is listening vocabulary.
Principles to Guide Vocabulary Development:
- Select Words That Children Will Encounter While Reading Text and Content Material
- Just because a word is long, does not mean it should be chosen. Choose words that students will read most often and that are useful to them
- Choose keywords which covey major ideas and concepts related to the text and are essential to understanding the passage
- Useful words- words that are relevant
- Interesting words- Words that will “tickle” the imagination
- Vocabulary Building words: Words that will urge child to seek clues for the meaning
- Teach Words in Relation to Other Words
- Teaching words in relation to words that students already know. This gets students to use background knowledge to detect similarities and differences.
- Teach Students to Relate Words to Their Background Knowledge
- Ask yourself, “What is it that students already know that they can use as an anchor point, as a way of accessing this new concept?”
- Teach Words in Prereading Activities to Activate Knowledge and Use Them in Postreading Discussion Response, and Retelling
- Focusing on words before reading activates their prior background knowledge
- ELL’s have a much easier time learning vocabulary when it is integrated into other activities. Isolating vocabulary into its own drill makes it more confusing and hard to understand for ELLs
- Use the words in a conversation with the student to build more meaning
- Teach Words Systematically and in Depth
- Go beyond having students repeat a definition
- Better ideas are: restating definitions in their own words, comparing definition to personal experiences, makeup sentence using the word
- Initiate conversations, ask open ended questions, provide feedback
- Students should be engaged in words by seeing them, hearing them, saying them, manipulating them, and playing with them
- For ELLs, read aloud sessions are effective
- Awaken Interest in and Enthusiasm for Words
- A teachers attitude towards vocabulary can be contagious. Share words of interest to you and tell stories about the words and their derivations
- Use different forms of media for instruction
- MAKE IT FUN!
Strategies for Vocabulary and Concept Development
- Relating Experiences to Vocabulary Learning
- The more direct and experience based, the better
- Vicarious experiences: Demonstrations, simulations, dramatization, visual and audio media, reading to children, keeping vocab logs, and reading on one’s own.
- Vicarious experiences can be used!
- Use technology to your advantage
- Using Context for Vocabulary Growth
- When teaching new meanings of words, sometimes context is not enough.
- The instructional goal should be to teach students to use context to gain information about the meaning of new terms
- This concept is especially important for struggling readers
- Developing Word Meanings
- Definitional knowledge-ability to relate new words to known words. Built thought synonyms, antonyms, and multiple meaning words
- Synonyms: words that are similar in meaning to other words.
- Focus of instruction is to help student associate new words with more familiar ones
- Antonyms: words that are opposite in meaning to other words
- Matching activities, selecting activities, etc.
- Multiple meaning words tend to confuse students
- Give students an opportunity to see how words operate in context.
- Classifying and Categorizing Words
- Give the opportunity for students to think about, think through, and think with vocabulary.
- Categorization: Students recognize they can group words that label ideas, events, or objects. Involves process of joining , excluding, selecting, and implying. Help students for relationships among words in the same manner as open and closed sorts. Amount of assistance given is the difference.
- Word Sorts: simple yet valuable activity to initiate. Children sort through vocab terms that are written on cards or listen on sheet. The objective is to group words into different categories by looking for shared features among their meanings.
- Closed sort: students know categories ahead of time
- Open sort: No categories are provided
- Concept Circles: putting words or phrases into sections of a circle then directing students to describe the relationships between the sections. If a section does not relate, students could possibly shade in that section.
- Semantic Mapping: Webbing. Shows reading and writers how to organize important information. Provides a visual display of how words are related to other words
- Analogy: Comparison of two similar relationships on one side the words are related in a certain way, on the other side the words are related in the same way as the first set of words.
- Paired-Word Sentence Generation: can be used to test students’ understanding of difficult concepts. Instructional strategy for developing word meanings through stories and writing
- Semantic Analysis to Writing:
- Teacher identifies theme and composes a question involving critical thinking related to the theme
- Teacher selects words used by the author or consults a thesaurus to find about 5 words, both synonyms or antonyms, relating to the theme
- Teacher constructs think sheet for discussion purposes as well as for writing
- Predictogram: In groups students predict how they think the author will use the words the teacher chose that might be challenging, in the story.
- Self selection strategy: children select words to be studied.
- Ask students to bring one word to class that they believe the class should learn. Teacher also chooses word
- These words are then written on the board and students give the definitions they gleaned from the context in which they found the word.
- Class members add any necessary information
- Students and teacher consult pertinent references such as dictionaries
- Word knowledge rating: way to get children to analyze how well they know vocab words.
- I’ve never seen the word
- I’ve heard of it but don’t know what it means
- I recognize it in context. It has something to do with…
- I know the word in one or several meanings
Classroom Connection: I really enjoyed all the different ideas for activities that this chapter gave. I rented the textbook for this class but I may need to purchase it after this semester as I have found that many chapters have so much critical information. After reading this chapter I have a much better idea of how I can make vocabulary instruction more fun! This will be very helpful when tutoring!
Macy Bombard- ENGED Blog 