Principles for Teaching Vocabulary in the Early Grades 

In this article in American Educator, Susan Neuman (New York University) and Tanya Wright (Michigan State University) cite the well-known vocabulary gap – entering first graders from high-income families know twice as many words as their low-income peers. But they believe the even worse news is that some adults believe the gap can’t be closed. “Luckily,” say Neuman and Wright, “there is now a rich and accumulated new knowledge base that suggests a far different scenario.” Specifically:

• Children learn words most rapidly in the preschool years, giving educators an ideal window to intervene.
• Effective vocabulary instruction can ameliorate reading difficulties later on, allowing children who started school way behind to be on grade level by fourth grade.
• The quality, quantity, and responsiveness of teachers and family members can effectively mediate socioeconomic status.
• Early gains in oral vocabulary can predict growth in reading comprehension and later reading performance.

“This means that, in contrast to dire prognostications, there is much we can do to enable children to read and read well,” say Neuman and Wright. The news is especially timely because the Common Core standards represent a markedly more rigorous and demanding set of expectations for students. 

Before presenting their principles for content-rich oral vocabulary instruction, Neuman and Wright puncture several myths:

• Myth #1: Children are word sponges. Earlier research suggested that young children can learn words from a single exposure (“fast mapping”). This turns out to be inaccurate. Instead, kids learn words incrementally by predicting relationships between objects and sounds, getting a more accurate fix on a word every time they see or hear it. “With each additional exposure, the word may become incrementally closer to being fully learned,” say Neuman and Wright.

• Myth #2: Children have an early vocabulary spurt. The latest evidence is that children absorb words at a steady, cumulative rate, and what accelerates over time is the integration and use of words after repeated exposures. “The high-performing student who knows many thousands of words has learned them not by having received a jolt of oral language early on, but by accruing bits of word knowledge for each of the thousands of words encountered every day,” say Neuman and Wright. This suggests that we need to continuously immerse children in oral and written vocabulary experiences.

• Myth #3: Storybook reading is enough. Children listening to and interacting with storybooks is certainly helpful, but recent studies have shown that it’s not enough to make up high-risk children’s deficits. Teachers need to supplement oral reading with intentional strategies that get students processing words at deeper levels of understanding.

• Myth #4: Teachable moments teach plenty of words. Parents and teachers pause and explain an unfamiliar word – “Celebrate means we do something fun” – but in busy classrooms, this happens only about eight times a day, and that’s not nearly enough to boost the vocabulary of students who are behind. Teachers need to be “proactive in selecting words that have great application to academic texts with increasingly complex concepts,” say Neuman and Wright. 

• Myth #5: Just follow the basal reader’s vocabulary scope and sequence. Studies of commercial reading programs reveal wide disparities in the number of words introduced, how they are taught, and their appropriateness to the grade level. Teachers need to supplement basal readers with a much more systematic approach to teaching grade-appropriate academic vocabulary. 

Neuman and Wright follow up with these five principles for vocabulary instruction for young children:

• We need both explicit and implicit instruction; it’s not enough for children to hear them in a story or for the teacher to mention them in passing.
• Be intentional about word selection. Teachers can explicitly teach only about 400 words a year. These need to be words that will take students to a higher level of vocabulary proficiency – words like habitat, organism, protection and compare, contrast, and observe.
• Build word meaning through knowledge networks that make sense to students. “It’s fair to say that words represent the tip of the iceberg,” say Neuman and Wright. “Underlying them is a set of emerging interconnections and concepts that these words represent.” And those links are what drive students’ comprehension – for example, abdomen, lungs, heart, brain. 
• Children need repeated exposure to gain vocabulary. Frequency is the key to vocabulary development, say the authors, with repetition happening in varied, meaningful contexts. 
• Ongoing professional development is essential. A proven routine for teaching new vocabulary: (a) Identify words that need to be taught; (b) Define the words in a child-friendly way; (c) Contextualize words in varied and meaningful formats; (d) Review words to ensure they’re retained; (e) Monitor children’s progress and reteach if necessary.

“The Magic of Words: Teaching Vocabulary in the Early Childhood Classroom” by Susan Neuman and Tanya Wright in American Educator, Summer 2014 (Vol. 38, #2, p. 4-13),

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2014/Neuman.pdf

From the Marshall Memo #542