3 Magic Words Us Andersen Pdf
Dorthea Seate
It seems almost intuitive that developing a large and rich vocabulary is central to learning to read. Logically, children must know the words that make up written texts in order to understand them, especially as the vocabulary demands of content-related materials increase in the upper grades. Numerous studies have documented that the size of a person's vocabulary is strongly related to how well that person understands what he or she reads, not only in the primary grades, but in high school as well.1
Yet here's the practical problem. Right from the beginning of schooling, there are profound differences in vocabulary knowledge among young learners from different socioeconomic groups. Just consider the following statistics: by age 4, a child's interaction with his or her family has already produced significant vocabulary differences across socioeconomic lines, differences so dramatic that they represent a 30 million word "catastrophe" (i.e., children from high-income families experience, on average, 30 million more words than children from low-income families).* Recent analyses indicate that environmental factors associated with vocabulary development and emergent literacy skills are already present among children as early as 15 months of age.2 By first grade, unfortunately, the repercussions become all too clear: children from high-income families are likely to know about twice as many words as children from low-income families, putting these children at a significantly higher risk for school failure.3
Even more disturbing, however, is that these statistics are often treated as inevitable, more or less a byproduct of poverty or low-income status. Think of the consequences! This would mean that these children could be designated as reading failures before they ever enter through the schoolhouse doors.
This means that, in contrast to dire prognostications, there is much we can do to enable children to read and read well. Although we certainly have more to learn, the good news is that we now have an accumulated body of evidence on the characteristics of effective vocabulary instruction. And it turns out that this news couldn't come at a better time.
You might say that we are entering into a new age of educational reform: the age of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). In the distant past, education was a local issue; districts acted on their own to adopt instructional guidelines and curriculum. In recent years, however, education has increasingly become more of a state and even a federal concern. The No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration's reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, increased the role of states in enacting standards, assessments, and accountability. In 2010, state governments took their turn, becoming more proactive in educational reform. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, working with the organization Achieve, set out to develop world-class standards that would essentially create a shared vision of what all students should know and be able to do in all grades, kindergarten through high school.
The purpose of this article is to explain our rationale for content-rich oral vocabulary instruction in the age of the CCSS, and how to effectively build children's vocabulary. But first, we dispel some of the common myths about oral vocabulary development, which have often led to a lack of attention for this important topic in school instruction. We then move to a set of instructional principles that should guide teachers' work.
Like many myths, these notions may contain some partial truths, almost like folk wisdom. For example, some authorities once claimed that learning was based on the "neural ripening" of the brain; applied to reading, this reflected a philosophy of "wait and see" until the child appeared "ready" for instruction. Research and writings in the 1950s and 1960s by cognitive psychologists provided powerful evidence that early childhood was crucial in the cognitive development of an individual.8 This conclusion led to designing new opportunities to engage children in early learning.
Today, however, there is ample evidence to suggest that children do not learn words through fast mapping.10 Rather, they learn words by predicting relationships between objects and sounds, which become more accurate over time. Word learning is incremental.11 Evidence for this comes from children's struggles to understand color words. Although infants can distinguish between basic color categories, it is not until about age 4 that they can accurately apply these individual color terms.12 Typically, words such as red or yellow may appear in their vocabulary; however, their application of these words to their referents may be haphazard and interchangeable.
Children, then, may have knowledge of these words, but this knowledge will be far from complete. Rather, word learning in most cases requires many exposures over an extended period of time.13 With each additional exposure, the word may become incrementally closer to being fully learned.
Recent evidence, however, suggests that the "spurt" in word learning does not correspond to any change in the rate of word learning, but to a change in the rate of children's integrating new vocabulary.15 In other words, it suggests that the vocabulary explosion is a byproduct of the variation in the time it takes to learn to actually use words. Although children are accumulating words at a constant rate, the written and verbal use of the words accelerates. We see, for example, a similar pattern with receptive and expressive language, with children demonstrating far greater capacity to understand meaning before they are able to effectively express ideas in words.
The course of word learning, therefore, has little to do with vocabulary explosions, bursts, or spurts. To the contrary, word learning is cumulative.16 The high-performing student who knows many thousands of words has learned them not by having received a jolt of oral language early on, but by accruing bits of word knowledge for each of the thousands of words encountered every day. By the end of high school, one estimate is that college-ready students will need to acquire about 80,000 words.17 This means that we should immerse students for extended periods in oral and written vocabulary experiences throughout their instructional years.
Myth 3: Storybook Reading Is Sufficient for Oral Vocabulary Development
Reading books aloud to children is a powerful and motivating source for vocabulary development.18 We now have a large corpus of research showing that children learn words through listening to and interacting with storybooks. Nevertheless, recent studies have begun to question whether incidental instruction through book reading may be substantial enough to significantly boost children's oral vocabulary development.19 Several meta-analyses, for example, have reported only small to moderate effects of book reading on vocabulary development.20 One group of researchers examined the added benefits of dialogic reading, an interactive reading strategy, on children's vocabulary growth and reported only modest gains for 2- to 3-year-olds.21 Further, these effects were reduced to negligible levels when children were 4 to 5 years old or when they were at risk for language and literacy impairments.
This means that exposure to words through storybooks is not likely to be potent enough to narrow the substantial gap for children who may be at risk for reading difficulties. Rather, to improve children's oral vocabulary development, teachers will need to augment the read-aloud experience with more intentional strategies that require children to process words at deeper levels of understanding.
However, over the course of the 20,000 hours parents and children spend together in the home before entering school, vocabulary words are likely to be repeated frequently. The problem is, teachers do not have that luxury. In our study of 55 kindergarten classrooms, for example, we found that although teachers provided more than eight of these word explanations per day, they were rarely, if ever, repeated more than once.22 Further, words selected for teachable moments were different across classroom settings. Far too predictably, our study reported that children who attended schools in the most severely low-income neighborhoods were likely to hear far fewer explanations, with those explanations offered at lower difficulty levels, than children in middle- and upper-income areas.
With the implementation of the CCSS, children will be expected to understand content-related words in science and history. This means that we cannot rely on teachable moments alone to help children develop word meanings. Rather, we will need to be proactive in selecting words that have greater application to academic texts with increasingly complex concepts.
Despite greater attention to words in elementary curricula, our results indicated tremendous disparity across curricula.24 For example, one curriculum listed an average of 20 target vocabulary words per week to be taught, whereas another listed, on average, only two. Further, the criteria used to select words to teach remained a mystery. In one curriculum, words were selected based on the weekly stories. In other curricula, we could find no organizing principle for the selection of words at all. Finally, using three different criteria, we found that many of the vocabulary words selected for instruction were far too easy to warrant school-based instruction.
Although there is certainly more to learn, we now have a growing research consensus about the characteristics of effective vocabulary instruction. Using evidence from our two recent meta-analyses synthesizing research from 75 vocabulary studies,25 as well as our own studies examining some of the mechanisms for word learning,26 five principles emerge to enhance oral vocabulary development, as described below.
c80f0f1006