Learning a Rich English Vocabulary in Japan

In this article in The Reading Teacher, Yokohama international school third-grade teacher Greg Feezell describes how he incorporates robust vocabulary instruction into his daily readers’ workshop block. He lets students choose the challenging words they will learn each week and encourages them write each word and the sentence in which they encountered it on a slip of paper, write their name on the back, and put it into the class’s Word Box. At the end of the week, Feezell chooses words from the box, focusing on tier two words – those that “offer more precise or mature ways of referring to ideas they already know about” (Beck et al.) – and avoiding obscure tier three words. Here’s one week’s list:

Anonymous

Confidential

Contagious

Extravagance

Orchard

Refused

Spiral

Words that don’t make it onto the next week’s list provide fodder for individual conferences with students; Feezell also works with students who aren’t submitting words. Here’s the weekly routine with the new words:

• Monday – Feezell spends 10-15 minutes introducing the words one by one (“Here’s an interesting word that Anna found”). He reads the student’s sentence, sometimes shows a picture, and has the class discuss possible meanings based on the context before reading the definition he’s written on a card. He then puts the word cards on the class word wall and students are responsible for learning them.

• Tuesday – The class, seated in front of an easel, collectively writes sentences for the new words, with some think-pair-share activity to generate more ideas. A sentence that started out “He is contagious” ended up “He washed his hands to avoid getting a contagious disease.” 

• Wednesday and Thursday – Students engage in a variety of activities in which they use and become more familiar with all the words on the word wall, not just that week’s. They might choose a word to illustrate and have classmates identify the word from their drawing, play a word tic-tac-toe, or play a movement game choosing between words with similar meanings (for example, resemblance and mimic). 

• Friday – One student is in the spotlight but the whole class is being assessed. Feezell reads ten questions aloud for the spotlighted student to answer. The rest of the class raises green, red, or yellow cards to show if they agree, disagree, or aren’t sure of each answer. This way, Feezell can see how well the whole class knows the words. 

When words seem solidly in students’ vocabularies, he takes the card down from the word wall but keeps them all on his desk. How does he know when words are mastered? Here’s one example: One day, the principal of the secondary school in Feezell’s complex paid an unexpected visit to the classroom. One girl whose native language is Japanese said, “Will you stay and watch our play? I beseech you!”

“Robust Vocabulary Instruction in a Readers’ Workshop” by Greg Feezell in The Reading Teacher, November 2012 (Vol. 66, #3, p. 233-237), 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/TRTR.01087/abstract; Feezell can be reached at gfeezell@gmail.com. 

From the Marshall Memo #463