Expanding Young Students’ Vocabulary

In this article in The Reading Teacher, Julie Dashiell (Old Dominion University) and Andrea DeBruin-Parecki (Educational Testing Service) suggest the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. strategy for increasing young students’ vocabulary and understanding – especially students who are most at risk:

• Fostering adult/child conversations – Adults should begin with open-ended questions, encourage lively exchanges, use complex, cognitively challenging words, and clarify their meanings as the conversation unfolds.

• Robust and motivational instruction – This includes choosing interesting target words; pronouncing the words correctly with children; giving age-appropriate explanations of the words; giving examples in a variety of contexts to help children understand, remember, and correctly apply the words; providing activities to pique children’s interest, awareness, and thinking (including on the Internet); and exploring relationships among words.

• Interactive storybook reading – This exposes children to rich and descriptive language and rare words and allows the teacher to ask open-ended questions and get into extended conversations as the story unfolds. 

• Engaging and literacy-rich environment – This might include word puzzles, board games, age-appropriate books and magazines, word walls, computer word games, and other vocabulary-enhancing displays and objects.

• Numerous opportunities to practice – Teachers can take opportunities in different subjects, recess, lunch, and school assemblies to get students applying and reinforcing words.

• Direct and explicit instruction – Teachers should pick Tier 2 words that are important to classroom content, the comprehension of a story, or the news (for example, catastrophic and flood after Hurricane Katrina) and teach them directly. 

• Sophisticated and rare words – Teachers should take every opportunity to stretch students’ vocabulary beyond everyday words – for example, frogs are amphibians, a hermit crab is a crustacean. 

“Supporting Young Children’s Vocabulary Growth Using F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Model” by Julie Dashiell and Andrea DeBruin-Parecki in The Reading Teacher, April 2014 (Vol. 67, #7, p. 512-516), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trtr.1250/abstract; the authors can be reached at jdashiell01@gmail.com and adebruin-parecki@ets.org.