Chapter 8 of Content Area Reading looks at developing a student’s vocabulary. Vacca, Vacca, and Mraz write “teaching words well means giving students multiple opportunities to develop word meanings and learn how words are conceptually related to one another in the texts they are studying” (CAR, 235).
Why is this important? Why do students need to have a better vocabulary?
To improve their reading comprehension. If students know the words they are reading on the page then their reading comprehension will improve.
However, how do we as teachers define vocabulary?
There are three distinct types:
- General – everyday words with well known meanings
- Special – words from general vocabulary that take on specialized meanings when adapted to different content areas
- Technical – words that are only used/applied in one specific area
To teach vocabulary it is important to know when to preface a reading and teach certain words, when to give a list of words for students to keep in mind during their reading, and to have a list of words students should discuss after reading.
To begin this process it is vital we look at the term “concept.” Many students learn in terms of concepts and every concept has its own hierarchy of relationships. To teach a concept it is helpful to look at this hierarchy of relationships, oftentimes through a graphic organizer.
To create a graphic organizer that explains the hierarchical relationships of a concept it is helpful to follow the following six steps:
- Analyze the vocabulary and list the important/key words
- Arrange the list of words in terms of a hierarchy from most important to related
- Add in example words for your vocabulary list that you believe the students already know to help clue them into the meanings
- Evaluate the organizer and make sure the relationships are correct
- Discuss the graphic organizer with the class before doing a learning task
- After learning task relate discussion back to graphic organizer and add more words if needed
However, before graphic organizers can be used in the class it is helpful to work with students before learning new vocabulary to activate their prior knowledge. Have them write on what they already know about the words with Word Exploration activities. Put the students in groups and have them brainstorm related words to the given vocabulary words.
If there is one word in particular that stands as a word beneficial for the student’s long term vocabulary, have them work with that one word. Have them categorize it, define it in their own words, brainstorm their own comparisons, illustrate what they think it is like, anything really that gets them using their own words/experiences to learn this new word will help commit it to their long term memory.
Other activities for long term memory include:
- Semantic Feature Analysis – create a chart of similar words and have students determine which properties go with which word and which words have overlapping properties
- Categorization Activities – create activities to help students explore the relationships between words
- Concept Circles – help students describe a concept by looking at relationships of concepts in circle
However, when faced with an unknown word while reading it is helpful if students have activities they can use to help unpack an unfamiliar word. Helping them learn how to use context, word structure, and the dictionary will help students learn unfamiliar words on their own.
Context offers three clues that will help students learn an unfamiliar word. The first clue is typographic and this clue can be found in footnotes, italics, bold, parenthetical explanations, pictures, graphs, etc. They are the visual aids included in text books meant to help explain an important concept, and teaching your students how to use these helpful clues will improve their reading comprehension. The second and third clues are syntactic and semantic clues – the clues hidden within the text. Learning how to unpack a sentence and write it in the most basic words will help student discover the meaning of words they don’t understand.
Word Structure can help students decipher an unfamiliar word too. The smallest unit of words, morphemes, will help students predict the meaning of a word. Teaching your students about well known morphemes, suffixes and prefixes, compound words, etc. will help prepare students to figure out a word while reading.
Finally teaching students how to use a dictionary may seem trivial, but most students don’t know how to approach the dictionary. Emphasizing the “best-fit” option for definitions will help students find the correct definition they are looking for in relation to what they are reading (a relation that can be helped by knowing the context of what they are reading.) it is important when asking students to use a dictionary for an assignment to use it sparingly. Have the students learn a few big concept words really well instead of overwhelming them with every descriptor word you can think of. (And a helpful side note is to teach students about the pronunciation keys and how to decipher the symbols and translate them into sounds.)
Vocabulary may seem like a trivial, memorize and go topic, but vocabulary is vital for a student’s reading comprehension. The better their vocabulary – the better their reading comprehension – the more they learn!
Literacy for Language Lovers 