Building Vocabulary in Primary-Grade Classrooms 

From the Marshall Memo #442

In this helpful article in The Reading Teacher, Edna Brabham (Auburn University), Connie Buskist (Auburn University Montgomery), Shannon Coman Henderson (University of Alabama/Tuscaloosa), Timon Paleologos (Troy University), and Nikki Baugh (Columbus, GA 1^st-grade teacher) present ways to fill elementary classrooms with words and boost the vocabularies and reading proficiency of all students. “Systematically flooding classrooms with dozens of novel vocabulary words each day has the potential to expand word learning for students with rich vocabularies and accelerate vocabulary acquisition for students with less-developed vocabularies,” say the authors. “Understanding the protean nature of vocabulary, our goals include not only creating great swells of vocabulary words for teaching, but also fostering readers’ fascination for learning more about the breadth and depth of words and language on their own.”

This contrasts with the traditional approach of teaching only 10-12 words a week (used by most basal reading programs). Average children learn 3,000 or more words a year, mostly haphazardly on their own, which means they’re soaking up 50-70 words a week. This shows what children are capable of, but a lot of those words don’t contribute to language proficiency. “Given the number of words children can acquire,” say Brabham, Buskist, Henderson, Paleologos, and Baugh, “we contend that limiting vocabulary instruction to teaching a few words each week fails to capitalize on human language potential and may deprive all children of opportunities to develop more robust vocabularies.”

The authors cite several recent studies showing that teaching lots more words produces robust gains in children’s vocabulary – especially with students who enter school with smaller vocabularies. But they caution that simply flooding students with a lot of new words isn’t enough: “Teachers also need techniques for organizing and teaching an abundance of words in ways that help children absorb and learn copious amounts of vocabulary instead of drowning in the deluge… Children cannot be expected to learn new words unless they have an established concept or schema to which those words can be attached and assimilated.” 

Brabham, Buskist, Henderson, Paleologos, and Baugh embrace three research-based steps to effective vocabulary instruction:

• Integration – Organizing words into semantically related clusters of new and already-known words (for example, bad people, eating, speaking);
• Repetition – Giving students lots of hands-on, minds-on encounters with these clusters in charts, wall displays, and elsewhere in the classroom;
• Meaningful use – “Having students verbally, visually, and physically explore degrees of word meaning, multiple meanings, and connections among words and the concepts they represent in their own reading and writing,” they say.

Here are some of the different ways the authors have seen these dimensions applied in classrooms:

• Teaching new words for known concepts by starting with known words – Following the lead of Nikki Baugh, the first-grade teacher on the team, the authors organized books into meaning clusters for read-alouds and follow-up classroom activities: Sizes, feelings, night/day, noises, speeds, and actions. Two examples:

       Noises: No Jumping on the Bed! by T. Arnold (Puffin 1987)

No More Water in the Tub by T. Arnold (Puffin 1995)

Koala Lou by M. Fox (Harcourt 1988)

Walk with a Wolf by J. Howker (Candlewick 1997)

The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs by W. Joyce (HarperCollins 1996)

      Feelings: The Way I Feel by J. Cain (Scholastic 2000)

The Story of Ruby Bridges by R. Coles (Scholastic 1995)

Look Out, Bird! by M. Janovitz (North-South 1994)

The Day the Goose Got Loose by R. Lindbergh (Penguin 1990)

Nicholas, Where Have You Been? by L. Lionni (Alfred A. Knopf 1987)

The Kissing Hand by A. Penn (Tanglewood 1993)

If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks by F. Ringgold (Aladdin 1999)

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by W. Steig (Aladdin 1969)

During interactive read-alouds and discussions of each set of books, teachers had students collect clusters of words and write them in ovals (the students dubbed these “concept eggs”). Here’s what was in a concept egg for big words: bigger, biggest, huge, tremendous, astronomical, massive, towering, immense, fantastic, gigantic, jumbo, monstrous, vast, galactical, titanic, broad, maximum, fabulous, giant, colossal, monumental, tall, hulking, stupendous, plump, mighty, magnificent, incredible, fat, mammoth, great, enormous. In their writing, students playfully talked and wrote about towering turnips, colossal cucumbers and cauliflowers, enormous eggplants, and astronomical artichokes. They also developed a features analysis grid, with the big words on the vertical axis and degrees of bigness on the horizontal.

• Teaching known and new words to build new concepts – Concept eggs were also used to teach students abstract categories (hypernyms) – for example, furniture – that unite concrete words. “Unexplained links among common words such as couch or sofa or cabinet and unfamiliar terms such as divan and cupboard abound in children’s literature and serve as obstacles to comprehension for our students,” say the authors. One teacher had her upper-elementary students create a concept egg for furniture from read-alouds, independent reading, and homework (chair, recliner, loveseat, davenport, sofa, couch, bookcase, armoire, chifforobe, sideboard, table, dresser, bench, credenza, highboy, wardrobe, stool, bookcase, chest, buffet, cradle, hutch, bed, chest) and then create a grid with the pieces of furniture on the vertical axis and specific characteristics on the horizontal axis (legs, cushions, shelves, drawers, surface to put things on, surface for sitting, low, high). Students then marked the characteristics of each piece of furniture. 

• Teaching new meanings for known words – Another way of building students’ breadth and depth of vocabulary is to learn multiple meanings of words. This is key for students who have limited vocabularies (especially English learners), who tend to be unaware that many words change meaning when they move into different contexts; those “familiar words with new and confusing meanings present serious obstacles to reading comprehension,” say the authors. “Wide reading coupled with explicit instruction and assistance as students encounter the same words in a variety of texts allows them to explore multiple meanings and compare the unfamiliar meaning in a text with definitions and examples from dictionaries or glossaries to derive a best fit meaning for that context.” Teachers did this by creating word chains with meanings stapled and looped together as tails attached to kites, and also grids stringing out different possibilities – for example, for the word light, listing adjectives with the same meaning (not heavy, moderate, slight, easy, pale), verbs (illuminate, stop flying, moving, ignite), and nouns (chandelier, rays from the sun, moon beams, candle flame). “The amount of classroom wall and ceiling space may be the only limit to imaginative techniques for teaching new meanings for known words,” say the authors. 

• Clarifying and enriching meanings of known words – During interactive read-alouds of books, teachers had students think about and act out the gradients of meaning among a list of related words – for example, having them write a word describing speed (ran, slipped, settled, sledded), wear it around their necks with a string, and then line up in order from slower to faster. An upper-elementary class created a grid with mad words on the vertical axis (angry, peeved, furious, piqued, perturbed, agitated, enraged, provoked, irritated, virulent, irate, ireful, livid, tiffed, chafed, incensed, vexed, infuriated) and looked at how far along the horizontal axis the characters in a story were (just a little, somewhat, definitely, very, extremely, violently). 

The authors close with a quote from Susan Woolridge (1997): “The great thing about collecting words is that they’re free; you can borrow them, trade them in, or toss them out. Words are lightweight, portable, and they’re EVERYWHERE!”

“Flooding Vocabulary Gaps to Accelerate Word Learning” by Edna Brabham, Connie Buskist, Shannon Coman Henderson, Timon Paleologos, and Nikki Baugh in The Reading Teacher, May 2012 (Vol. 65, #8, p. 523-533), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/TRTR.01078/abstract; Brabham can be reached at brabhed@auburn.edu.