Intervention for Struggling ELL Readers
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5. Teaching Vocabulary
- Educated families hear 30 million more words by Kindergarten than those that are disadvantaged.
- Children learn to understand 3 words a week up to age 18 months
- After age 2, children learn about 10 words a day or about 3,500 words a year until age 30.
- First graders from higher SES groups know twice as many words as those from low SES groups.
- The quality of a parent’s language predicts a child’s language and performance at 3 years with continuing effects.
- In elementary school, children should learn 2,500 to 3,000 words a year.
What We Know About Vocabulary and Comprehension
- Vocabulary knowledge influences reading comprehension
- Exposes students to knowledge
- Factors into the achievement gap
- Must be systematically taught for ELLs and classified students
- Must be taught in ALL content areas
Multiple Vocabulary Exposure
- It takes a minimum of 26 times of successful, accurate exposure to a word before it is mastered – reading, writing, speaking, listening/hearing
- Students need multiple exposures to a word to learn it well (Lawrence, 2009; Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985).
- All students need additional encounters in different contexts to ensure that they develop rich orthographic, phonological, and semantic knowledge of the word (Perfetti & Hart, 2002).
- McKeown, Beck, Omanson, and Pople (1985) found that students who had 12 instructional encounters with target words learned the words better than students who had only four.
How do we teach vocabulary?
- Indirectly
- Explicitly
- Word-conscious teachers who use unusual words
- Repetition
- Rich literacy environments
- Responsive discussions using children’s literature
- Back and forth conversations, expansions, repetitions
- Questions to get children to talk
- In content areas: music, art, social studies, sicence play, math
- Prefixes, suffixes, roots, phonics, morphology – 2nd grade and up
See the Course Objectives | Research | Materials folder for resources that aid in teaching vocabulary
What is a literacy-rich environment?
- Accessible books: 5 – 8 per child at a range of 3 to 4 grade levels
- Rocking chair, rugs, throw pillows – environment!
- Multiple genres
- Open-faced shelving
- Books stored by genre
- Leveled books
- Felt board and roll stories
- Method for checking out books (book bags)
- Books on audio/cd
- Rules and modeled use of materials
- Organized literacy centers
Resources for Vocabulary Instruction
Word Count: www.wordcount.org/main.php
Student-friendly Definitions: Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English: www.ldoceonline.com
To support students' morphological skills and word learning strategies: Visuword Online Graphical Dictionary www.visuwords.com/search
WordSift: www.wordsift.com
Word Generation: (http://wordgeneration.org)