Word Walls and

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Alice Berecka, TAMU-CC, SISD Gay Becker, The
Word Junction

• Word Walls and
• Word Junction
• Morphemic Analysis in the Core Curriculum

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• Word Walls
• Not just for Elementary, anymore

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What is a hemacytometer?

• Compare
• hemophilia
• hemoglobin
• hemorrhage
• cytoplasm
• cytology

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What is a hemacytometer?

• meter
• hem blood cyt cell
• A hemacytometer is a device that measures blood
  cells.

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What do these words have in common?

• amnesia
• amnesty
• mnemonic

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The answer is

• Mne memory (Greek base)
• Prefix a not (also from Greek)

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Why vocabulary?

• A well-developed meaning vocabulary is a
  prerequisite for fluent reading, a critical link
  between decoding and composition (Joshi,2005).

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Your Turn!

• ambivalent
• ambiguous
• ambidextrous
• valiant
• valor

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In Latin

• ambi both
• val brave
• ambivalent undecided, seeing good points on
  both sides of an issue

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The Matthew Effect

• Even though reading is a major source of
  vocabulary development, poor readers learn fewer
  words from reading than do good readers (Jenkins,
  Stein, Wysocki, 1984).

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The Matthew Effect

• This is because poor readers tend to read easier
  materials and fewer books than do good readers.
• Consequently, poor readers vocabularies grow at
  a slower pace.

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The Matthew Effect

• Students with robust vocabularies, on the other
  hand, read more, comprehend better, and thus read
  more still, improving their vocabularies.
• This poor reader/good reader phenomenon is
  commonly referred to as the Matthew Effect after
  a passage in the Bibles Book of Matthew the
  rich get richer and the poor get poorer
  (Stanovich, 1986 Walberg Tasi, 1983) (p.
  213).

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The research says.

• According to one review of the research,
  vocabulary deficiency is the primary cause of
  academic failure for disadvantaged students in
  grades 3 through 12
• (Becker, 1977)

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Comprehension

• There is no doubt that vocabulary is closely
  tied to comprehensionin study after study,
  vocabulary knowledge predicts comprehension
  performance consistently with positive
  correlations typically between .6 and .8.
• Pearson, P., Hiebert, E., Kamil, M. (2007)

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Across the curriculum

• Vocabulary serves a core role in commercial
  reading programs and in other curricular areas
  such as science, history, or foreign language.
• Pearson, P., Hiebert, E., Kamil, M. (2007)

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4 Stages

• Dale and ORourke (1971) list four stages of word
  knowledge
• I never saw it before.
• Ive heard of it, but I dont know what it means.
• I recognize it in contextit has something to do
  with
• I know it.

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Some questions for teachers

• How do we address the vocabulary deficits of
  struggling readers?
• What can we do to counteract the Matthew Effect?
• What words do we teach?
• What tools and strategies work best?

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Middle School and High School

• By the time students are adolescents, most have
  acquired the ability to handle basic sound-symbol
  relationships.
• BUT, they are more liable to encounter problems
  with morphemic units (affixes and bases) and
  derivational consistencies or inconsistencies as
  they try to use and spell polysyllabic words.
• (Henderson, 1990)

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Morphemic Analysis

• Morphemic analysis is the study of meaningful
  word parts such as compound words, roots,
  prefixes and suffixes.
• Morphemic analysis can help low-achieving readers
  recognize hundreds of words (Gunning, 2006).

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The need for morphological analysis

• Study by Carlisle
• 60 of the unfamiliar words students encounter
  in texts they read are derived words.
• (Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 2007)

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The Ways Words Work

• By analyzing and sorting words, searching for
  related words, and discovering ways words work,
  upper level students learns clusters of words
  that share a common element or origin rather than
  individual words by memorizing definitions.
• (Hennings, Journal of Adolescent and Adult
  Literacy, 2000)

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Struggling readers

• When tested on their knowledge of morphology,
  struggling readers knew only 15 of the prefixes,
  17 of the roots, and 20 of the suffixes (Henry,
  1990).
• Given training in morphology, adolescent
  struggling readers improved in both reading
  comprehension and spelling (Elbro Arnbak,
  1996).

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Working memory

• Using a morphological segmentation may help
  struggling readers by easing the burden on
  working memory, because they can concentrate on
  one meaningful segment at a time.
• (Gunning, 2006)

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G-L words

• A majority of English words are built from
  Graeco-Latin (G-L) elementsaffixes and bases
  derived from Greek and Latin.
• Within specialized fields of study such as the
  sciences and humanities, occurrence of G-L words
  gets very close to the 100 mark.
• These words are used very infrequently in
  everyday conversations.
• (Corson, 1985)

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Incidental vs. Systematic Instruction

• An incidental approach is one in which skills are
  taught when the need arises.
• A systematic approach is one in which skills are
  taught on a regular, planned basis.
• (Gunning, 2006)

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The advantages of a systematic approach to
vocabulary acquisition

• Vocabulary is given more emphasis.
• This can create an interest in words.
• Students are not only learning new words, they
  are learning strategies and habits that will
  foster independent word learning.
• They see the importance of a wider vocabulary,
  and become motivated to increase their
  vocabularies on their own (Curtis and Longo,
  1999, p. 37).

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Contact Information

• You can reach Alice Berecka at
• aberecka_at_sintonisd.net
• You can reach Gay Becker at
• gaybecker_at_thewordjunction.com