Module Four: Content Area Vocabulary Development: Getting your Students to First Base

Objectives:

During this module you will

  1. Learn how vocabularies evolve from young learner, oral language users to reading unfamiliar content words.
  2. Examine three types of vocabulary learners in content classrooms and choose vocabulary strategies appropriate for each type of word learner.
  3. Select vocabulary strategies and use them with students.

Introduction

Using our baseball model for developing content reading skill, to get to first base readers must be able to read and understand the words.

Especially in content areas, readers will encounter many new words with which they have no previous experience. Vocabulary has been described as the coins of literacy.

Perhaps the biggest difference among proficient readers and struggling readers is that proficient readers seem to have an extensive vocabulary of words they recognize and use.

Student Vocabularies

All students have three separate vocabularies. The first vocabulary they acquire at an early age is their listening and speaking vocabulary. Growth in a student's listening and speaking vocabulary is rapid and largely accomplished without direct instruction (toddlers do not have a formal "scope and sequence" of speaking skills they follow).

As students enter school and begin to experience instruction, they begin to develop a second vocabulary; words they can read. Acquiring their reading vocabulary is greatly enhanced if the first vocabulary, listening and speaking, is of sufficient size to use as a referent for matching words. They match words new only in print to the same word that exists in their speaking vocabulary.

A third and smaller vocabulary is the words students use when they write.

Types of Word Learners

The ability to acquire and learn new vocabulary words is a necessity for all content readers. Unfortunately, not all students are spontaneous word learners.

Three Types of Word Learners

1. Neurologically Spontaneous Word Learners

Some students enter school knowing between 2,500-5,000 words. Theseproficient word learners learn an estimated 3,000 words per year during their early school years. They accomplish that by learning, on average, the meaning of about eight new words each day to accomplish such rapid growth. We must humbly realize that we can't teach words that fast, and these rapid word learners have a gifted neurological capacity for spontaneous word learning. These students build vocabulary through such literacy tasks as daily reading and, perhaps, seeing a new word only once on a page. They are masters of context clues strategies and detecting root words in larger words. It appears that these students are mentally wired for language acquisition.

2. Impoverished Word Learners

Other students, because of a lack of a home literacy culture, as mentioned in Module One is referred to as “functional illiteracy,”school knowing far fewer words. Their language learning processes arevocabulary impoverished. It is not always related to family social status or income, but that may also exacerbate the problem. These students just have not had the early speaking and listening experiences needed to develop a good vocabulary base. Perhaps they are second language learners, or family talking and reading experiences were not valued. They quickly begin to acquire vocabulary skills once formal instruction has begun.

Also, with the addition of readily available technologies and apps, students spend a great deal of the time playing electronic games instead of learning simple sounds or words. However, they quickly begin to acquire vocabulary skills after formal instruction has begun.

3. Impaired Word Learners

A final group of students can be described as language impaired.Students' learning skills are hampered by known and unknown learning problems. This group has difficulty learning and retaining the meaning of new words. These students enter school with a much smaller vocabulary and have difficulty constructing word meanings from context. Learning and retaining word meanings will be difficult for these students.

Content Vocabulary Instruction Challenge

It is not an unusual situation to have all three types of vocabulary learners sitting in your classroom simultaneously. The effective content reading teacher will need to know about the three kinds of word learners in his/her classroom, and vary vocabulary strategy instruction accordingly.

Research suggests that we really don't know a word if we cannot complete the following:

  1. Spell the word.
  2. Use the word in a sentence.
  3. Give a non-dictionary definition.
  4. Provide several synonyms for the word.
  5. Generate an image or picture, visually depicting the word.
  6. Finally, the best way to demonstrate word knowledge is to write at least a short paragraph applying most of the above criteria.