Vocabulary Instruction That Makes a Difference

In this Education Week article, Sarah Sparks reports on research indicating that the 10,000-word vocabulary gap between lower-SES and upper-SES children entering school often widens as they move through the grades. Susan Neuman (University of Michigan/Ann Arbor) and Tanya Wright (University of Michigan/East Lansing) have found that lower-income students are less likely to be taught academically challenging words. “Vocabulary is the tip of the iceberg,” says Neuman. “Words reflect concepts and content that students need to know. This whole common core will fall on its face if kids are not getting the kind of instruction it will require.” 

Neuman and Wright studied kindergarten classrooms and found tremendous variation in the number of words explicitly taught – from two to 20 words a day. In addition, words tended to be taught episodically as they came up in stories and were seldom words needed for future success or linked to other words. “So, a student hears the word ‘transportation’ in a book about trains,” says Rebecca Silverman (University of Maryland/College Park). “If the teacher doesn’t explain it in a general context, the student might not get the full sense of the word, and  might think it’s just related to trains.”

Earlier research suggests that students need to hear a new word an average of 28 times to remember it. Repetition, practice, and making links to similar words are particularly important for high-value words, but few teachers work with new words in this systematic way. “In other words,” says Neuman, “we’re not teaching very many words, and we’re not teaching in a way that children will retain the words. Essentially, I’m teaching these words, hoping like hell they’ve learned it, and never checking whether the children have learned it.”

Analyzing four major reading basals (Houghton Mifflin Reading, Pearson/Scott Foresman Reading Street, Harcourt Trophies, and Macmillan/McGraw-Hill Treasures), Neuman and Wright found that, on average, the programs introduced 8-10 new words a week, mostly Tier I words (those already in students’ speaking vocabularies). Here are examples of words in the three tiers of Isabel Beck’s approach to vocabulary: 

• Baby (a Tier I word) – Most students know these words without instruction;
• Principle (Tier 2) – Students need to understand words like these in order to participate academically in a number of subject areas; Tier 2 words often have more than one meaning and require multiple repetitions to be committed to long-term memory;
• Platypus (Tier 3) – Words like these are technical and specific to a particular field of study, but may crop up in a story and need to be explained.

“Essentially, what we found was a very haphazard approach to vocabulary instruction,” says Neuman. “The ‘challenging’ vocabulary choices were not based on frequency, not based on the supporting academic words children need to know like ‘during’ and ‘after,’ not content-rich words, like ‘predict.’ Why would you choose to emphasize the word ‘platypus’? It makes no sense.”

Rather than choosing words based on stories (platypus) or phonics (cat) or to reinforce the link between spoken vocabulary and texts (baby), teachers and basal-reader authors should make sure students learn a good list of Tier 2 words (like principle), say the researchers. Textbook publishers claim that their forthcoming 2014 editions will have a greater emphasis on vocabulary-building in line with Common Core expectations. But at the most, they will introduce 300 words a year. This is not nearly enough to close the vocabulary gap, which means students will rely on incidental learning from their in-school and out-of-school reading and discussion to learn the thousands of other words required for adult literacy. 

“Studies Find Vocabulary Instruction Is Falling Short” by Sarah Sparks in Education Week, 

Feb. 6, 2013 (Vol. 32, #20, p. 1, 16), www.edweek.org 

From the Marshall Memo #473