Vocabulary Development:

Understanding What One Reads

Why is vocabulary important?
We know that vocabulary instruction is important.

When our students can understand, decode, and determine the meaning of new
words, their reading comprehension improves.
We want our students to engage with new words, learn them, and use them!
But how?
What is vocabulary development?
Vocabulary development is a process of acquiring new words to use in daily
life, and more specifically, the basis for learning any language. Vocabulary
development focuses on helping students learn the meaning of new words and
concepts in various contexts and across all academic content areas. Teaching
students to develop vocabulary means providing explicit instruction on
important words from text and teaching students strategies to help them learn
word meanings independently. It is critical for both oral and written
vocabulary development to increase as students get older to enable them to
comprehend increasingly more complex grade level text (Kamil et al., 2008;
Loftus & Coyne, 2013).
What is the importance of including vocabulary instruction across the
content areas?
· Vocabulary knowledge aids in activating and building background
knowledge to make connections to text, and having vocabulary knowledge can
increase reading comprehension and fluency while reading.
· Vocabulary knowledge can improve writing skills and build knowledge of
other word meanings through known root words, prefixes, suffixes, and word
families.
· Content areas such as mathematics, science, history, music, reading and
language arts, and others often require content specific vocabularies. For
example, in mathematics, students must have a deep understanding of words
such as estimate, denominator, factoring, and the like to be able to complete
assignments; while in science, words such as hypothesis, scientific notation,
and magnesium may be necessary to grasp the content of the text.
The Simple View of Reading
In spite of its importance in the world of reading research, many
practicing educators do not know about the Simple View of Reading.
It is a formula demonstrating the widely accepted view that reading
has two basic components:1. word recognition (decoding) and2.
language comprehension.
Decoding (D) is defined as “efficient word recognition” (Hoover &
Gough, 1990). This definition goes beyond the traditional definition of
decoding as the ability to sound out words based on phonics rules. The
meaning of decoding expands to include fast and accurate reading of
familiar and unfamiliar words in both lists and connected text (Gough
& Tunmer, 1986).  For the first Simple View studies, students read a
list of pseudowords to assess decoding.
Language comprehension (LC) is called by several other names in
various studies, including linguistic comprehension, listening
comprehension, and comprehension. All of these terms are defined as
the ability to derive meaning from spoken words when they are part of
sentences or other discourse. Language comprehension abilities, at a
minimum, encompass “receptive vocabulary, grammatical
understanding, and discourse comprehension” (Catts, Adlof, &
Weismer, 2006). For the Simple View studies, the student listens to a
passage read aloud then retells the passage combined with answering
oral questions that were not addressed in the retell.
Reading comprehension (RC) differs from language comprehension
because of the reliance on print, as opposed to oral language, to
perceive the words and derive meaning (Hoover & Gough, 1990). In
other words, language comprehension becomes reading
comprehension when word meaning is derived from print. It is
possible to have strong language comprehension and still be a poor
reader if there is difficulty with decoding. For the Simple View
studies, the student reads a passage then retells the passage combined
with answering oral questions that were not addressed in the retell.
 Four Practical Principles for Enhancing Vocabulary
Instruction
Drawing on instructional materials, classroom images, and
observational data from research, the authors illustrate these
principles: establishing efficient, rich routines for introducing
target word meanings; providing review activities that promote
deep processing of word meanings; responding directly to student
confusion; and fostering universal participation in and
accountability for vocabulary instruction.
1. Establish Efficient yet Rich Routines for Introducing
Target Words
Intensive, multifaceted vocabulary instruction can take a
significant amount of instructional time. Thus, efficient, rich
routines for introducing word meanings are critical when
teaching a large number of target words.
2. Provide Review Experiences That Promote Deep
Processing of Target Words
In addition to the need for efficiency in target word
instruction, students benefit from active and deep processing
of word meanings. Ongoing review should be used to provide
students with multiple exposures to target words and to
promote deep processing.
3. Respond Directly to Student Confusion by Using Anchor
Experiences
Students can easily become confused when learning new word
meanings. Such confusion can spread from student to student,
and teachers should thus respond directly to inaccurate usages
by providing students with clear anchor definitions and
examples.
 4. Foster Universal Participation and Accountability
Students with greater vocabulary knowledge can dominate
word-meaning instruction, causing other students to become
passive. Therefore, it is important to foster universal
participation in vocabulary activities and to hold all students
accountable for learning word meanings.
Content Area Vocabulary Learning
Vocabulary lies at the heart of content learning. To support the
development of vocabulary in the content areas, teachers need to give
their students time to read widely, intentionally select words worthy of
instruction, model their own word solving strategies, and provide students
with opportunities to engage in collaborative conversations.
Vocabulary is a significant predictor of overall reading comprehension
(Baumann, Kame'enui, & Ash, 2003) and student performance (Stahl &
Fairbanks, 1986). When readers know a lot of words, they can read more
complex texts. When writers know a lot of words, they can compose more
sophisticated documents. For decades, the value of vocabulary was evident in
content standards, and most states or provinces typically had a standard related
to vocabulary.
Vocabulary is at the core of literacy
Reading, writing, speaking, and listening are grounded in the formulation and
understanding of written and verbal messages. Without meaning, words and
phrases are nothing more than a nonsensical string of sounds or letters.
Vocabulary is not an isolated skill; readers, writers, speakers, and listeners
marshal what they know about words and phrases to understand and convey
coherent messages in what Thorndike termed “a cooperation of many forces”
(1917, p. 232). Vocabulary researchers have long advocated for instructional
approaches that capitalize on these “many forces,” especially through teaching
structural, contextual, and morphemic analysis skills (Baumann, Edwards, &
Boland, 2003; Brusnighan & Folk, 2012), using oral language channels (Beck
& McKeown, 2007), leveraging texts to facilitate discussion and interaction
(Lennox, 2013), and teaching for word appreciation and word consciousness
(Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2008).
The demand on vocabulary knowledge intensifies throughout the elementary
and middle school years, especially in regard to print. Nagy and Anderson
(1984) estimated that students entering ninth grade needed to know and
understand 88,500 word families, stating that “even the most ruthlessly
systematic direct vocabulary instruction could neither account for a significant
proportion of all the words children actually learn, nor cover more than a
modest proportion of the words they will encounter in school reading
materials” (p. 304).
Yet in too many cases, vocabulary instruction is isolated from other aspects of
the instructional day, particularly in content area learning. It is far too common
to assign students a list of words (usually technical terms) that will be used in a
social studies or science unit and then ask them to look up words and write
definitions so that they can then compose solitary sentences. This limited
exposure to words and phrases in decontextualized situations has not proven to
be effective, nor is it of a sufficient intensity. In an observational study of
Canadian upper elementary classrooms, Scott, Jamieson-Noel, and Asselin
(2003) found that 39% of vocabulary instructional time was dedicated to
definitions, mostly through dictionary and worksheet use. Vocabulary
instruction in elementary content area classes was even more limited. The
same researchers found that an average of only 1.4% of social studies,
mathematics, science, and arts instructional time was devoted to vocabulary
development. Whether your goal is to meet the demands of the Common Core
State Standards, or for locations not impacted directly by these standards but
where vocabulary is a significant concern, we recommend that teachers attend
to four significant components of word learning: wide reading, selecting words
to teach, modeling word solving, and providing students opportunities through
collaborative conversations to actually use their growing vocabularies.
Wide reading
One of the ways that students build their vocabularies is through reading. If
students read 60 minutes per day, five days a week, they will read more than
2,250,000 words per year. Mason, Stahl, Au, and Herman (2003) estimate that
this level of reading will result in students learning 2,250 words per year, far
more than could ever be taught through direct instruction alone. Unfortunately,
there is less attention to wide reading as teachers focus their attention on
instructional routines such as close reading. But expert teachers, as noted by
Sanden (2012), continue to provide students opportunities to read
independently and combine this with “assistance in areas such as monitoring
student choices, teaching independent reading behaviors, and maintaining a
focus on student growth” (p. 224). In the rush to raise the rigor of students’
reading, teachers should remember that practice does not make perfect, but
rather permanent. Students need practice with a lot of texts so that they build
their background knowledge and vocabulary. They also need instruction with
specific words that will unlock increasingly complex texts. And that starts with
selecting the right words for instruction; words that students are not likely to
learn while reading.

Selecting words and phrases to teach

As we have noted, students need to learn thousands of words per year,
depending on their grade level. Teachers simply cannot directly teach all of the
words students need to learn. As we will discuss later in this article, thankfully
students learn a lot of words while reading. Those words reserved for
instruction should be worthy of the attention. That is to say, for students to
develop a depth of knowledge about words and phrases, teachers need to
carefully select the words they will teach.
In terms of priorities, the standards suggest that students should learn general
academic and domain-specific words and phrases. General academic words,
commonly referred to as Tier 2 words, are those that mean different things in
different content areas or contexts. For example, the word set could be used in
everyday conversation (“set your pencil down to show me you are ready”) or
in mathematics (the set of numbers in a range from 4 to 13). General academic
words have sometimes been neglected because they are seen as less
demanding.
In addition to general academic words and phrases, students must be taught
domain-specific, or Tier 3, words and phrases. Terms such
asphotosynthesis, personification, and odd number are domain-specific
because their meaning is fairly well set and consistent.
There are also basic words that students must learn, often referred to as Tier 1
words. These are not included in the English language arts standards but
instead are featured in the foundational skills. More specifically, foundational
skill standard 3 focuses on word analysis (“Know and apply grade-level
phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words”), which requires that
students develop their knowledge of high-frequency words and use affixes and
morphology.
But understanding these types of words really doesn't help with selecting
words and phrases worthy of instruction. In Figure, we provide questions for
consideration when selecting words. We drew on the work of several
researchers, including Graves (2006), Hiebert and Kamil (2005), and Nagy
(1988) to identify questions that lead to decisions about which words to teach.
If the word is representative of words students should know at that grade level
or if it is key to understanding the text, it's probably worth teaching. If the
word is going to be used repeatedly, then it might be worth teaching. If the
word will be needed for post-reading tasks, such as discussions or writing, then
it is probably be worth teaching. If the word's meaning can be determined from
context or structural clues, then it might not be worth teaching.

Here are some teaching strategies that will help

you make the most out of vocabulary instruction:
1. Keep your students reading! Your students will encounter a
wide variety of words just through reading. Provide students
with a reading challenge to encourage them to pursue
independent reading. We know that this alone will expose
students to more new vocabulary.
2. Keep it fresh. Don’t do the same thing week in and week
out. Both you and your students will get bored! Switch up
your teaching strategies to keep it interesting!
3. As you add words you want your students to know, don’t
forget to review. Continually bring back words they’ve
already studied. Use past assessments to gather words
students have difficulty with.
4. Help all learners. Use a variety of practice activities. Not all
students will respond to “write a short story using three
vocabulary words in context.” I like to think
about Gardner’s multiple intelligences. By offering
multiple ways to practice, you can reach all learners.
5. Set realistic expectations. Can your students learn 100
words in a school year? You may want to choose the “must
know” words (or even Latin or Greek roots) that you want
your students to know inside and out.
6. Use Tiers. Sort the words into three tiers. Tier 1 includes
basic words that don’t need instruction, Tier 2 includes high
frequency words that are used to talk about more complex
issues and through several contexts. Tier 3 includes very
specific, low frequency content vocabulary. You can focus
your instruction on the Tier 2 words — those that students
need and will encounter across multiple texts.
7. Work at a realistic pace. Can your students learn 20 new
words a week? Remember that just because you get through
the entire book or word list doesn’t necessarily mean your
students will have retained anything.
8. Visit vocabulary regularly. This may be the hardest tip to
follow! We often put vocabulary instruction on the back
burner. Short regular vocabulary reviews are better than a big
cram session.
 9. Keep/create a stack of vocabulary words you’re working
on. As you introduce new words, add a card. Use index cards
and just write the word on the front in big letters. You’ll be
amazed by how often you can pick them up, grab a card, and
have a quick review or game with your students.
10. Consider using a word wall. These don’t have to be
just for lower grades. But, instead of sorting words by letter,
consider sorting them by word families, roots, or tier 1
meanings. Again, though, use the words — point them out,
use them, review them.

Activity: Among suggested teaching strategies that will help you make the most
out of vocabulary instruction, choose two strategies and explain how these will be
presented in the class. Submit your answer through online text submission in the
LMS and prepare it for presentation during our discussion next Saturday ( January
22, 2022).