Vocabulary

William Nagy's book, Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Reading Comprehension (NCTE, 1988), outlines many of the principles I hold true in vocabulary instruction.

My husband, Darryn, is one of those 10% of people that learns vocabulary by doing a vocabulary workbook. Most people, research shows, learn vocabulary in the context of reading or listening. I am one of those, and being a voracious reader, I can kick Darryn's butt when it comes to vocabulary any day. My only problem is that, by learning vocabulary predominately through reading, I can spell and use but not always pronounce new words correctly. This leads to the occasional faux pas.

Needless to say, when it comes to facilitating my students' vocabulary development, I am a believer in doing it in the context of reading and, whenever possible, speaking. And that facilitation is important. Our vocabulary defines us, allows us to code switch between different social groups, and gives us the power of articulating ideas well. Students miss questions on standardized tests often not because they do not know the standard a question is supposed to assess, but because they do not know the meaning of a word in the question or associated text. I don't pretend to think I can teach every child every word he or she will need to know to be successful. I am not a believer in lists or programs, except for low-level readers and English as a Second Language students, who are starting the game linguistically behind. I just want every child to increase his or her lexicon...by a lot. I want my students to become life-long word sleuths, noticing and cataloguing good words, appreciating the nuances of diction and flavors of dialect. I want them to question, not overlook, unfamiliar terms. I want guessing meaning from context and prior knowledge to be a habit, and I want to help students gain the kind of prior knowledge that will help them analyze word meanings effectively.

As a young teacher I was accosted from day one with vocabulary workbooks from various publishers. It took awhile for me to start seeing what worked for students and what didn't. The first big idea I came to was that students needed their study of vocabulary words to be grounded in text. Looking back, this was an obvious idea given the way most state standards pertaining to vocabulary are written, but it's not so obvious in the deluge of SAT, drill-oriented, easy to grade prefab vocab programs being pushed by the edpub industry. Besides, I had experienced this latter type as a student myself, and without analyzing the standards deeply or knowing the research, it was easy to get confused. The second big idea came from attending a CMS-sponsored, sit and get workshop with Michael Clay Thompson, who wrote the impressively detailed and indexed Word within a Word series, which focuses students on memorizing and using hundreds of Greek and Latin stems in order to analyze word meanings. Over the years, I used the first volume of his series (Royal Fireworks Publishing Company, 2nd ed., 1994) extensively in the design of my vocabulary instruction. Though often misused (I've seen teachers focus their programs entirely on rote memorization of stems), it's a great resource. He provides lots of challenging ideas for extending and assessing stems, and I love his analogies because they focus on thinking about words and can initiate good discussion. That leads to my third big idea: words need to be discussed, honored, played with, and used, student-teacher, student-student, and teacher-teacher.

Vocab Tools
Bingo
Flashcards (20 per sheet)
Flashcards (stems; 25 per sheet)
Flip Flopper (fold over to hide definitions)
Visualization Sheet
Visualization Sheet 8x14"
Word Window Format
I used this format on index cards to create
class word windows/walls.

Writing
I worked vocabulary requirements into the rubrics of most assignments, as appropriate, but another option would be creating opportunities for students to use their expanding lexicons in writing or public speaking.

Teen Ban prompt

Mid-Carolina High, 2008-09
It took 12 years for me to feel satisfied with the design of my vocabulary program, embodied in the lessons and tests here. Like most of my previous work, the analogies and stem material come from Michael Clay Thompson's Word within a Word series, Volume 1, but students' vocabulary is self-selected from their independent reading. My classes cycled through a lesson from start to test about every two weeks. First, we discussed the stems (selected from the analogy section) as a class. Students then had a week and a half or so to find ten somewhat challenging words from their independent reading and complete the analogies on their own. Then, in class we we discussed the analogies, students checked their guesses (with me, each other, or the dictionary), and finally a class or two later, we tested. The emphasis was on discussion, being able to use the stems to figure out words, and knowing one's own self-selected vocabulary well enough to demonstrate meaning effectively. As a bonus, I usually learned some new vocabulary myself.

If I were to revise these, I would put new analogies on the tests so students would have to use their knowledge more than recall the answers we discussed in class.

Piedmont Middle, 1997-07

      Morrison's Master Stem Lists
          by 10s, developed from WWW Vol. 1
     Blank Student Stem Lists Sheet

Limited English Proficient Section, 2001-02
I made the break from prescribed workbooks in 2001 when I taught a section of Limited English Proficient (LEP) students. I knew they needed a lot of context, English listening and speaking practice, and repetition. I used passages I felt had good target words in them. In each unit, we discussed and drew about the passage before reading, read it together, wrote out the vocab words (while talking about spelling and pronunciation), guessed at meanings from context, then checked meanings (usually by matching cut-up simplified definitions), worked through synonyms and antonyms, wrote and shared sentences, and then did some kind of activity with the stems and/or the vocab words before the test.
     Blank Unit Format
    LEP Tests (7)

In the 2002-03 school year, I didn't have an LEP section, but I was assigned three different ability-grouped levels based on NC EOG scores: Regular (low-level readers), Accelerated (regular-level readers), and Scholars (high-level readers). I based the reading passage portion of my vocabulary program on passages from McDougal-Littell's Wordskills workbook.

Regular Section: 10 stems per lesson (tested with recall and yes/no questions), same Wordskills passage for 2 lessons with 10 words each time, lots of up-front meaning-oriented work with passage similar to LEP units
     Low Wordskills Vocab List
     Low Tests (6)

Accelerated Section: 10 stems per lesson (tested with recall and yes/no questions), different Wordskills passage for each lesson with 10 words each time, lots of up-front meaning-oriented work with passage similar to LEP units
Accelerated Wordskills Vocab List
Accelerated Tests (12)

Scholars Section: 25 stems per lesson (tested with recall and yes/no questions), passages excerpted from classics and tested with fill-in-blank from memory (no word banks), some up-front meaning-oriented work with passage prior to test
Scholar Tests (12)

Back to ELA Files