Classroom Steps to Developing Students’ Vocabularies

From the Marshall Memo #432

“The classrooms of teachers who support the vocabulary development of their students are energized verbal environments – environments in which words are not only noticed and appreciated, but also savored and celebrated,” says University of Pittsburgh professor Linda Kucan in this article in The Reading Teacher. She recommends four ways to get high-quality words like sagacious, brisk, frigid, and perfidy into students’ mental lexicons. The key is paying attention to what words mean – and how they work:

• Phonology – “For young children, learning about how words work begins with cues to attend to the sounds of words,” says Kucan. “Teachers provide these cues by orchestrating children’s participation in activities such as listening to and chiming in on rhymes and songs and clapping the syllables in long words and short words.”

• Orthography – This is the bridge between spoken and written words, and students need to build words and notice what happens when they add and subtract letters – for example, set becoming sent becoming tent with the addition and substitution of letters. 

• Morphology – Students need to study the meanings within words, often through Greek and Latin roots, for example, -er, -or, and –ist denoting “someone who” as in dancer, actor, and naturalist, and spect meaning “to look at” as in inspect, inspector, perspective, retrospective, and spectacular. Include lessons on homophones like coarse and course and homographs like bass (the fish) and bass (the guitar). 

• Syntax – Students can explore verb and noun forms, for example, inspire/inspiration, illustrate/illustration, getting the feel of parts of speech and how words can move from one to another. 

Kucan suggests teaching words in carefully designed instructional sequences. The first step is choosing which words to teach, and Kucan suggests that teachers zero in on Tier 2 words in high-quality classroom books – words that students will encounter in many texts, can understand from their own experiences, but are unlikely to hear and use in conversation. Mature language users include Tier 2 words in conversation, and authors use them in stories and articles. At the kindergarten level (and above), these might include commotion, concentrate, envious, forlorn, timid, and appropriate. In first grade (and above), they might include anxious, evaded, leisurely, prominent, and savoring. In the book, When Marian Sang (Ryan, 2002), these words deal with the important ideas of the story: prejudice, unwavering, humiliations, endured, dignity, awe, restrictions, and trepidation. “Selecting one over another depends on what teachers discern to be the ‘traction’ or ‘mileage’ that specific words provide,” says Kucan. “Which provide opportunities for building connections to other words?”

The next steps are introducing words in ways that help students make sense of them, getting students interacting with the words in interesting ways, and assessing the depth of students’ knowledge of the words. For the word unwavering from When Marian Sang, here are some steps:

• Give the context of the word in the story (Marian’s mother had an unwavering belief that Marian would find the training she needed to be a great singer).
• Explain the meaning of the word, giving counter-examples.
• Display the word on a poster or word card with other words.
• Have students pronounce the word after you.
• Provide an additional context for the word, for example the unwavering dedication of a dancer who practices every day.
• Use various forms of the word – unwavering, unwaveringly, and wavering.
• Engage students in interacting with the word through a variety of activities, including reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
• Assess students’ understanding of the word in its various forms. 
• Have students work with the word over time.

“What Is Most Important to Know About Vocabulary?” by Linda Kucan in The Reading Teacher, March 2012 (Vol. 65, #6, p. 360-366), 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/TRTR.01054/abstract