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Why This Item Is Important
JosƩ was pointing out to me in his direct way the fallacy the middle school I taught at had fallen into. As teachers, we were relying heavily on our textbooks to tell us which words to teach, and in doing so, we were completely inundating our students with words to know. JosƩ simply gave up, realizing that there was no way he could learn all those words in one week. The ideal number of words that students can handle cognitively is eight to ten a week for deep teaching (Scott, Jamieson-Noel, & Asselin, 2003); JosƩ had almost 80 words to learn!
Textbooks commonly identify several words in either the teacher manual or the student edition that are central to the meaning of the text, yet the thinking behind these selections is not clear. Nagy (2008) points out that publishers donāt have a consistent rule for selecting important vocabulary; rather, they go with words that are multisyllabic or repeated in later chapters. While it is easy to rely on textbooks to make this instructional decision, selecting which words to teach is too important for teachers to not give their input into the words they teach; they must consider the diversity of their students, studentsā background knowledge, and which words are truly central to the reading and learning students are expected to do in the classroom.
The strategies and the research on selecting words join together in this chapter. There are several ways teachers can select words for instruction. The resulting words will differ from the words that students will pick up through conversation and reading; in fact, we know we need to rely on students to participate in several reading opportunities to increase their vocabularies exponentially beyond what we are able to achieve in the classroom (addressed in Chapter 8).
Do ThisāNot That principle #1: DO thoughtfully choose words to teach students; DONāT assign long lists predetermined by a textbook or publisher.
Updated Strategy #1: Tiering Words
A good beginning strategy to use when selecting vocabulary is to think about the ātiersā or ālevelsā of words that educators can identify for instruction. Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2002) tier words like this:
Tier 1āGeneral
Commonplace; learned from interactions with texts and people
Tier 2āSpecialized
Change meaning with context (polysemic)
Tier 3āTechnical
Specific to the discipline
Content Area Example: An example of this can be done with words and terms related to Memorial Day, such as freedom, war, picnic, hot dog, veteran, no school, and memorial. Tiered, they look like this:
Tier 1āGeneral
ā¦ hot dog
ā¦ no school
ā¦ picnic
Tier 2āPolysemic
ā¦ freedom
ā¦ war
ā¦ veteran
ā¦ memorial
Tier 3āContent Specific
The focus on instruction for these words is on the polysemic wordsāwords that have multiple meanings in different contexts. If I am teaching in a social studies class about Memorial Day, the Tier 2 words are important for me to focus on. I introduce students to their meaning in my class, but I would also have them brainstorm meanings for those words in other contexts, too. Polysemic words allow students to have power over academic language!
Updated Strategy #2: Answering Questions
Fisher and Frey (2011) developed a list of questions to assist teachers in deciding if a certain word is truly worthy of their teaching time.
| 1. Representative | | Is the word critical to understanding? |
| 2. Repeatability | | Will it be used again? |
| 3. Transportable | | Is it needed for discussions or writing? |
| 4. Contextual analysis | | Can students use context to figure out the word? |
| 5. Structural analysis | | Can they use structure? |
| 6. Cognitive load | | Have I exceeded the number of words they can learn? |
Content Area Example: A group of fifth-grade science teachers used this list of questions to analyze the set of words the textbook designated for instruction in the classroom, shown in Figure 1.1. The text book had thirty-three words designated for study across five lessons.
Figure 1.1 Words to Teach (Recommende...
