Effective Vocabulary Instruction

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Effective Vocabulary Instruction
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Introductions

• Robert Kohser
• Teachers are Role Models, not Scapegoats
• Exercise. Eat an apple every day.
• Display a Positive Attitude (NOT fake)
• Have a Hobby
• Dress Well
• Smile (perhaps not at first ?)
• Say hello their name

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Meet Your Classmates

• Name
• Graduated from
• What do you teach and where?
• What you like most about education.

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Expected Outcomes

• 1. Unfamiliar vocabulary interferes with
  comprehension.
• 2. Explicit vocabulary instruction is important.
• 3. Select prime words for instruction.
• 4. Learn about concept instruction in the content
  areas.
• 5. Dictionary definitions are limiting in
  teaching concepts.
• 6. Identify instructional tools for teaching
  concepts.
• 7. Use student interest and prior knowledge 
• 8. Incorporate activities that reinforce
  vocabulary through repetition while maintaining
  student interest.
• 9. Help students understand different types of
  context clues 
• 10. Use morphology to aid comprehension
  (prefixes, suffixes and root words)

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My Expected Outcomes

• Understand more about government imposed hoops
  and how you your students must jump through
  them.
• Learn how to accept the hoops and incorporate
  them into your existing, intellectually
  stimulating curriculum.
• Learn how to prevent our students from becoming
  standardized citizens still pass the
  standardized tests.

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Section IFramework for Vocabulary Development

• Examine how unfamiliar vocabulary interferes with
  comprehension.
•  
• Review research highlighting the importance of
  explicit vocabulary instruction.

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The limits of my language mean the limits of my
world.Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889-1951,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
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How does vocabulary affectreading comprehension?

• Read the passage that begins with Acoustically,
  the syllable is an unanalyzable spoken unit.

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Making Connections Activity
What makes this text challenging to
comprehend? What independent word learning
strategies did you use to help you make sense of
the passage? List the words that made
comprehending this text difficult. How does this
experience relate to the Conceptual
Framework? Discuss the importance of background
knowledge and vocabulary in comprehension.
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 What does the research say?

• Read aloud the research on PP 6

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The Vocabulary Gap

• Children who enter with limited vocabulary
  knowledge grow more discrepant over time from
  their peers who have rich vocabulary knowledge.
• The number of words students learn varies
  greatly.
• 2 vs. 8 words per day
• 750 vs. 3000 per year

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Between grades1 and 3

• Economically disadvantaged students vocabularies
  increase by about 3,500 words a year
• Middle-class students vocabularies increase by
  about 5,000 words a year.

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Language acquisition in school

• Printed school English
• 500,000 graphically distinct word types
• Half of 500,000 words occur once or less in a
  billion words of text.

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• Childrens vocabulary size approximately doubles
  between grades 3 and 7.
• Massive vocabulary growth appears to occur
  without much help from teachers.

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Think About It

• Take an 8 minute break
• Ask one person a goal they plan to reach during
  this lifetime
• Be able to tell us their name goal after the
  break

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Reaching GoalsVSEnjoying the Process

• Are schools more focused on reaching goals or
  enjoying the process of learning?
• Be sure to incorporate a focus on intellectually
  stimulating material into your FCAT preparation.
• Getting there is half the fun.
• Do we think this way?

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Road Rage Statistics

• 72.84 of drivers tailgate another driver to
  encourage them to speed up go faster.
• 80.50 use obscene gestures with other drivers.
• 72.67 feel angry when another motorist does
  something stupid.
• Stats taken from an 11,000 person survey on
  roadragers.com.

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Selecting Words for ExplicitVocabulary
Instruction

• Participants will
• Know when and how to select vocabulary for
  explicit instruction.

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• The goal for vocabulary development is to ensure
  that students are able to apply their own
  knowledge of words to appropriate situations and
  are able to increase their knowledge through
  independent encounters with words . . .
  Research . . . indicates that the best way to
  reach this goal is to help students add to their
  repertoires both specific words and skills that
  promote independent learning of words, and also
  to provide opportunities from which words can be
  learned. Beck and McKeown, 1991

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Tier One Words

• Most basic words
• Clock, baby, happy
• Rarely require instruction in school

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Tier Two Words

• High-frequency words for mature language users
• Likely to appear frequently in a wide variety of
  texts and in the written and oral language of
  mature language users
• One test Do students have ways to express the
  concepts?
• New words offer students more precise ways of
  referring to ideas they already know about

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Tier Twonot simple synonyms

• More precise or more complex forms of the
  familiar words

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Criteria for Identifying Tier Two Words

• Importance and utility
• Instructional potential
• Conceptual understanding

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Tier Three Words

• Frequency of use is quite low
• Best learned when needed in a content area
• Necessary to understand a selection

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A Process For Selecting Words To Teach

• Determine what you want your students to learn
• Identify the general words that lend themselves
  to various word-learning strategies and are high
  frequency (Tier Two)
• Identify key terms that are related to the units
  theme (Tier Three)
• Decide on appropriate strategies to introduce and
  reinforce the words.

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Instructional InterventionContinued

• Make School Relevant
• Career-Based Everything
• Banking
• Automotive
• Real Estate
• Web Publishing
• Read Up-to-date literature
• Cleverly incorporate the classics
• Sex Sells STILL
• Have things changed all that much?
• Technology
• PDAs, Smartboards, Cell Phones
• Internet Access Everywhere
• Students MUST assume responsibility for their
  actions

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Teaching Concepts

• Participants will
• Learn the importance of concept instruction
• Consider the limitations of dictionary
  definitions
• Identify instructional tools for teaching concepts

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Teaching Words as Concepts

• Learning words as concepts means
• learning to conceive and express new ideas
• acquiring a sophisticated schema that facilitates
  meaningful interpretation in a variety of contexts

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Treat a word as a concept ?

• Is knowledge of the concept necessary for
  understanding the text or is it only incidental?
  
• Are there words that could be grouped together to
  enhance understanding a concept?
• What strategies could be employed to help
  students integrate the concept (and related
  words) into their lives?
• How much prior knowledge will students have about
  this concept and its related words?
• Is the concept significant and does it therefore
  require pre-teaching?

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Select vocabulary to understand a specific text

• Select content specific vocabulary for explicit
  pre-teaching
• Select vocabulary necessary for student
  comprehension

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Dictionary Definitions

• When students looked up a dictionary definition
  and used the word in a sentence
• 63 of the students sentences were judged to be
  odd (Miller Gildea, 1985)
• 60 of students responses were unacceptable
  (McKeown, 1991, 1993)
• Students frequently interpreted one or two words
  from a definition as the entire meaning (Scott
  Nagy, 1989)

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• Definitions, as an instructional device have
  substantial weaknesses and limitations.
  Definitions do not teach you how to use a new
  word and do not effectively convey concepts.
  Think of it this way Why isnt a glossary of
  biological terms an adequate substitute for a
  biology textbook? (Nagy, 1989)
• thus knowing a word cannot be identified with
  knowing a definition
  (Nagy Scott, 2000)

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Concept Map
Category What is it?
Properties What is it like?
Quadrilateral
Comparisons What is something similar?
All four sides are congruent
rectangle
Square
All four angles are congruent and right (90
degrees)
Diagonals are congruent, bisect each other, and
are perpendicular
Computer disk
Different colors on a chess board
Illustrations What are some examples?
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Helping students understand difference in degrees
of meaning

• Linear Arrays help students understand
  relationships between words that differ in
  degrees of meaning.
• Begin by showing students the relationship
  between words.

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Vocabulary Poster

• Word
• Definition
• Sentence or twofrom the text
• Graphic

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parlor Definition formal living room Anne
Hathaways home was a three-bedroom house with a
small parlor . . .
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Explicit Vocabulary InstructionPromoting
Integration, Repetition, Meaningful Use

• Participants will
• Learn how to use student interest and prior
  knowledge to expand and refine vocabulary.
• Know how to incorporate activities that reinforce
  vocabulary through repetition while maintaining
  student interest.

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Word Sorts

• Closed sort
• students know the categories in advance
• Open sort
• students determine the categories

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Interactive Word Walls
corpse
cadaver
graveyard shift
wake
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Explicit Vocabulary InstructionIndependent Word
Learning Strategies (Section V)

• Know how to help students understand different
  types of context clues and how authors use these
  context clues to assist readers.
• Know how to use morphology (prefixes, suffixes
  and root words) to help students develop their
  vocabulary.

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Context Clues

• Context clues can help you figure out the meaning
  of words and phrases. Six types of context clues
  are
• Definition
• Restatement
• Examples
• Contrast And Comparison
• Synonym/antonyms
• Familiar language experience
• Association
• Reflection of Mood

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The Matrixcorrelates withFahrenheit 451

• Instructional InterventionContinued

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Morphology Use prefixes, suffixes and root
words to help students develop their vocabulary
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DISSECT

• Step 1 Discover the context
• Step 2 Isolate the prefix
• Step 3 Separate the suffix
• Step 4 Say the stem (if you cannot, go to steps
  5, 6,7)
• Step 5 Examine the stem (Rules of 2s and 3s)
• Step 6 Check with someone
• Step 7 Try the dictionary

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Independent word learning strategies include

• Learning how to use context clues
• Knowing how to use morphemes
• Knowing how to use dictionaries effectively
• Knowing how to personalize word learning

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Using Dictionaries Effectively

• Use the dictionary after reading a word in
  context, rather than before
• Understand how dictionary definitions are
  designed
• Try some nontraditional dictionaries

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Personalizing Word Learning Keyword Method

• Define the unfamiliar word.
• Select a keyword for the unfamiliar word. Link
  keyword with unfamiliar word.
• Recall the meaning.

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Other Methods for Personalizing Word Learning

• mnemonics
• graphics
• visualization
• dramatization

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What is Effective Vocabulary Instruction?

• Dont
• Use word lists
• Rely only on the dictionary
• Rely too much on context for definitions
• Use words out of context
• Do
• Connect words to prior knowledge
• Use words in context
• Connect words to concept development
• Read to students
• Encourage silent reading

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Vocabulary Log

• A four-column journal in which you record the
  challenging new word, the sentence in which you
  found the word, the dictionary definition, and a
  picture.

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Vocabulary Log Journal
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Planning vocabulary instruction

• Choose impact vocabulary
• Determine level of instruction
• Decide on intensive instruction
• Integrate
• Repeat
• Use in meaningful ways
• Study word families and roots

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Selecting words for explicit, intensive
instruction

• Choose Tier Two Wordswords that are important
  because of their general utility in the language
• Choose words that are important to understanding
  the lesson
• Choose conceptually difficult words
• Choose groups of words with related meanings