Vocabulary Education
October 16, 2012
The topic of this week’s class was
vocabulary education. The class
participated in teaching strategies for vocabulary education as well as
discussion about research on the effectiveness of vocabulary education and
frontloading activities.
Research on
Vocabulary Teaching
Throughout
this class, there were multiple evidences for the importance of vocabulary
education presented. Research
suggests that vocabulary knowledge can act as a predictor of comprehension, is
widely associated with intelligence, and used to make judgments about how
others use vocabulary. Students
can learn vocabulary in many ways such as reading and direct instruction, and
the best method to learn vocabulary is a mixture of both. Vocabulary includes words ranging from basic
words such as “when” and “these” to specialized subject area language such as “mitosis”
and “chloroplast”. It is important
to help children learn as many words as possible.
Vocabulary
has become even more important as writing has gained prevalence in our
society. According to Yancy,
reading has previously played a more important role in our society, however
with the increase in technology, especially the personal computer everyone is
now required to compose a great deal.
These new literacies have changed the way we write. The author suggests that because of
these changes to writing we should change our current modes of composing and
modes of instruction for writing in schools.
Teaching Strategies
To begin the lesson on vocabulary we did an activity called "I have... Who has?" In this exercise, each student is given a slip of paper. This paper has a word that the student must match and a phrase to read for the next student to match to. This is a quick way to review vocabulary that the students need to practice and work with.
Another great strategy for learning vocabulary is frontloading activities. Frontloading activities are any type of activity that motivates, prepares, and supports
students in learning new concepts, especially vocabulary. Some examples of frontloading activities include Anticipation guides, Frayer Model, List-Group-Label, Prediction Charts.
The final vocabulary teaching strategy demonstrated was verbal pantomime. In this strategy, small groups of students are given a vocabulary word. Each student then writes a story to try to have the other students in their class guess the word. This is a great review activity for end of unit review.
Academic Vocabulary
The following video features Elizabeth Coelho of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education discussing the use and instruction of academic language.
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