Vocabulary Development Lesson

[Octavis Marquez]

Withouta doubt, the best way to help your child learn new words is to read to them as often as possible. Reading aloud is even more effective when you take the time to stop and explain the meaning of any unfamiliar words as you go. Other fun vocabulary activities you can do with your child include:

There are many ways to improve and increase vocabulary skills. With Time4Learning, building vocabulary skills is fun and easy! It uses exciting, multimedia activities to teach standards-based reading & vocabulary lessons as part of a language arts curriculum.

Webinar description: Vocabulary knowledge is the key to communication. No one can understand or be understood without it. In this session, participants will examine the role of vocabulary learning in proficiency development and explore the importance of vocabulary development in designing and implementing thematic units. Participants will learn research-informed strategies for identifying, presenting, and spiraling vocabulary to facilitate acquisition.

Webinar Facilitation Guide (Word, PDF): This facilitation guide is designed for use by a facilitator and/or participants engaged in professional learning designed around this webinar and its focus topic(s). Facilitators and/or participants may use the facilitation guide in whole or in part, all at once or spaced out over time. They may additionally customize the facilitation guide to best suit their needs by modifying, adding to, or eliminating suggested discussion questions and/or tasks. The facilitation guide begins with an overview of the webinar goals and its organization. It follows with suggestions of structured discussion questions and tasks that are organized for use before, during, and after webinar viewing and aligned to the stated webinar goals.

To receive a certificate of completion (including a CTLE certificate), NYS educators must view the recording of the webinar (see link above) in its entirety and then answer at least seven out of ten questions correctly on the post assessment. If the minimum required score (7 out of 10) is achieved, the educator will receive a certificate via email within an hour. For the convenience of our World Language educators, there are multiple versions of the post assessment available, should the required score not be achieved on the first attempt. Educators may take each version of the post assessment once.

Dr. Joanne O'Toole is a Professor of Modern Language Education in the Curriculum and Instruction Department at SUNY Oswego. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the NYSED World Languages Content Advisory Panel and the Principal Investigator of the NYS World Language Standards Initiative. Joanne has served in several world language leadership positions including NYSAFLT President and NECTFL Director, and is a regular presenter at national, regional, state, and local conferences. Joanne is a certified teacher of Spanish and taught Spanish for 16 years prior to entering post-secondary education.

Dr. Lori Langer de Ramirez began her language teaching career as a teacher of Spanish, French and ESL. She holds a Master's Degree in Applied Linguistics and a Doctorate in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently the Director of World and Classical Languages & Global Language Initiatives at the Dalton School in New York City. Lori is the author of books, texts and articles about language teaching and learning and multicultural education. She presents workshops at local, regional and national conferences and works with teachers in schools throughout the U.S. and around the world. Her website (www.miscositas.com) offers free materials for teaching Chinese, English, French, and, Spanish.

Bill Heller has taught in public elementary, secondary, community college and undergraduate classrooms for 40 years, including 24 years teaching Spanish at Perry High School. He has been a methods and Spanish instructor at SUNY Geneseo since 2001. He is a frequent presenter of workshops, webinars and keynotes. Bill served as Conference Chair for the 2018 Northeast Conference (NECTFL) and is currently a member of the Executive Board and Content Advisory Panel for World Languages at the New York State Education Department (NYSED).

We know that young children acquire vocabulary indirectly, first by listening when others speak or read to them, and then by using words to talk to others. As children begin to read and write, they acquire more words through understanding what they are reading and then incorporate those words into their speaking and writing.

Vocabulary knowledge varies greatly among learners. The word knowledge gap between groups of children begins before they enter school. Why do some students have a richer, fuller vocabulary than some of their classmates?

Children who have been encouraged by their parents to ask questions and to learn about things and ideas come to school with oral vocabularies many times larger than children from disadvantaged homes. Without intervention this gap grows ever larger as students proceed through school (Hart and Risley, 1995).

From the research, we know that vocabulary supports reading development and increases comprehension. Students with low vocabulary scores tend to have low comprehension and students with satisfactory or high vocabulary scores tend to have satisfactory or high comprehension scores.

How do we close the gap for students who have limited or inadequate vocabularies? The National Reading Panel (2000) concluded that there is no single research-based method for developing vocabulary and closing the gap. From its analysis, the panel recommended using a variety of indirect (incidental) and direct (intentional) methods of vocabulary instruction.

The amount of reading is important to long-term vocabulary development (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1998). Extensive reading provides students with repeated or multiple exposures to words and is also one of the means by which students see vocabulary in rich contexts (Kamil and Hiebert, 2005).

Intentional Vocabulary Learning

Students need to be explicitly taught methods for intentional vocabulary learning. According to Michael Graves (2000), effective intentional vocabulary instruction includes:

Students need a wide range of independent word-learning strategies. Vocabulary instruction should aim to engage students in actively thinking about word meanings, the relationships among words, and how we can use words in different situations. This type of rich, deep instruction is most likely to influence comprehension (Graves, 2006; McKeown and Beck, 2004).

Research by Nagy and Scott (2000) showed that students use contextual analysis to infer the meaning of a word by looking closely at surrounding text. Since students encounter such an enormous number of words as they read, some researchers believe that even a small improvement in the ability to use context clues has the potential to produce substantial, long-term vocabulary growth (Nagy, Herman, and Anderson, 1985; Nagy, Anderson, and Herman, 1987; Swanborn and de Glopper, 1999).

Applying the target words provides another context for learning word meanings. When students are challenged to apply the target words to their own experiences, they have another opportunity to understand the meaning of each word at a personal level. This allows for deep processing of the meaning of each word.

The ability to analyze word parts also helps when students are faced with unknown vocabulary. If students know the meanings of root words and affixes, they are more likely to understand a word containing these word parts. Explicit instruction in word parts includes teaching meanings of word parts and disassembling and reassembling words to derive meaning (Baumann et al., 2002; Baumann, Edwards, Boland, Olejnik, and Kame'enui, 2003; Graves, 2004).

Semantic maps help students develop connections among words and increase learning of vocabulary words (Baumann et al., 2003; Heimlich and Pittleman, 1986). For example, by writing an example, a non-example, a synonym, and an antonym, students must deeply process the word persist.

Each Take Aim level teaches 288 carefully selected target words in the context of engaging, non-fiction stories. The target words are systematically taught using the research-based strategies described above. The intensive and focused lesson design helps students learn the target words and internalize the skills and strategies necessary for independently learning unknown words.

Read Naturally also offers a Splat-O-Nym app for iPad that teaches vocabulary using game-based technology. Splat-O-Nym quizzes students with synonym questions, antonym questions, and meaning-from-context questions and awards points for correct answers.

Today on the podcast we're joined by Tanya Wright, author of A Teacher's Guide to Vocabulary Development Across the Day, the newest addition to The Classroom Essentials Series. We're also joined by series editor Katie Wood Ray.

Katie: Good afternoon, Tanya. I'm so excited to talk to you about your new book. It's the next installation in the classroom essential series. It'll be out in October. A Teacher's Guide to Supporting Vocabulary Development Across the Day. So congratulations, first of all, on having finished it. And we're so excited to have you be a part of the Heinemann family. You've written lots of other things and other books, but this is your first Heinemann book. So congratulations.

Katie: Well, it's interesting that you say that because that's one of the first things I wanted to talk about. I took a walk this weekend with my three and a half year old nephew and my sister was with me too. And I was just thinking about, it's such a joyful time right now in his development. And it's really all... So much of it is about words. His approximations are so wonderful and he's leaning in to trying to understand what things mean. He's interested in words. He ask us what we mean by things. And it's just so joyful. And I was thinking about your book and that's really the stance that you bring to this work, is clearly the stance of the book. And just, that as adults, we should both marvel at the learning children are doing and also just find joyful ways to support them in it. And just curious about how you came to that stance?

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