Sixth Graders Look Everywhere for Academic Vocabulary 

In this article in The Reading Teacher, Margaret McKeown, Amy Crosson, Nancy Artz, Cheryl Sandora, and Isabel Beck (University of Pittsburgh) describe “In the Media,” a way to get students to notice academic vocabulary in real-world contexts. In the Media is part of RAVE – Robust Academic Vocabulary Encounters – a program that teaches words chosen from a 3.5-million-word list taken from academic texts. (The ten that appear most frequently are analysis, benefit, concept, derived, established, factors, indicate, legal, method, and occur.)

In the Media is a voluntary activity that challenges students to find RAVE words in the world around them. When students see a word, they fill out a “word deposit slip” telling where they found it and how it was used. Students earn a point for each deposit and ten points get them a homework pass, bonus points, extra computer time, or another reward. 

McKeown and her colleagues studied the implementation of In the Media in two sixth-grade classrooms and wondered if only the highest-achieving students would take part. They found no correlation between achievement and participation – students who participated were from all levels of the achievement spectrum. The main driver of participation seemed to be social, and peer chemistry varied from class to class. The researchers tried a “Double Points Challenge”, offering two points for every word spotted, and this was successful in boosting participation. 

Where did students find words? The most common source (for 43% of words) was literature: in Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl they found sustained and traditions. The Twilight series and The Hunger Games were also hot spots. Television was an active source: isolated thunderstorms in a weather forecast, “It is hard to sustain the flavor” on the Food Network, and various legal terms in NCIS and Harry’s Law. 

“The most heartening signs that students were really tuning in to words in their world were the unlikely sources of encounters they reported,” say McKeown et al. “This kind of evidence suggests that students were developing an awareness of words even in brief, passing nonacademic contexts. These included:

• Consume in a silica packet inside a newly purchased purse (“do not consume”);
• Drama in the word dramatization in the corner of a Clinique TV commercial;
• Dominant in sports broadcasts (dominant players);
• Unique in a church service (“Everyone has a unique relationship to God”);
• Mutual in Facebook pages (you can have a mutual friend);
• Criteria on a school poster about the criteria for Student of the Month;
• Potential on a crystal growing kit (potential for burning);
• Decline in the amount of first-class mail, spotted in a parent’s Mail Pro magazine.

Sometimes teachers had to dig for the meaning and context and redirect students. Three students reported encountering the word suspend watching a football game on TV. “The lights at the field were suspended,” wrote the first. “The power suspended at the field,” wrote the second. “They had to suspend the football game because the power went out,” wrote the third, clarifying what had really happened. 

Did all this noticing and reporting improve students’ knowledge and understanding of academic vocabulary? Looking at pre- and post-test results, McKeown and her colleagues found a significant positive relationship between In the Media participation and word mastery. The more RAVE words students found, the better they did on the post-test. 

Students also got a vivid sense of the multiple meanings and connotations of words. For example, the definition students were given for expose was, “If you expose something, you let it show or make it known.” Here are some of the contexts that students found:

• Miners blasting off a mountain to expose coal.
• Students being exposed to different styles of music.
• Exposing someone for mistreating a dog.
• “You feel foolish, exposed, stupid,” from Stargirl
• “He felt exposed along the bare edge of the gorge,” from Warriors: Firestar’s Quest

There was another benefit to In the Media: students got multiple experiences with each word in a variety of contexts, which McKeown and her colleagues believe was another reason their word knowledge improved so much. 

“In the Media: Expanding Students’ Experience with Academic Vocabulary” by Margaret McKeown, Amy Crosson, Nancy Artz, Cheryl Sandora, and Isabel Beck in The Reading Teacher, September 2013 (Vol. 67, #1, p. 45-53), 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trtr.1179/abstract; McKeown can be reached at mckeown@pitt.edu. 

From the Marshall Memo #505