Infusing Vocabulary Into the Reading-Writing Workshop

A Guide for Teachers in Grades K-8

Amy Benjamin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138126138
• eBook ISBN: 9781317296881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learn how to make vocabulary instruction more effective by making better use of mini-lessons and word study time to achieve durable learning about words and how they work. In this essential new book, literacy expert Amy Benjamin presents her 4E model (Exposure, Exploration, Engagement, Energy) for teaching vocabulary so that students gain deep understanding, improving their overall language and literacy skills. Benjamin guides you through bringing these 4Es to life in your K-8 reading-writing workshop.

-Exposure: Enrich your teacher talk with sophisticated words and phrases to facilitate natural language acquisition and application of new words.

-Exploration: Promote consistent vocabulary growth with a multifaceted instructional approach that incorporates etymology, word associations, word families, spelling, and morphology.

-Engagement: Build students' confidence by encouraging meaningful use of new words, both in and out of the classroom.

-Energy: Enliven your workshop and increase participation with a variety of word games, puzzles, projects, and cooperative learning activities.

Each chapter provides practical examples and scenarios to help you apply the model to your own classroom. The appendices include a variety of strategies for organizing reading-writing workshops, a thorough introduction to academic word lists and their role in vocabulary instruction, and an analysis of forty Latin and Greek word roots for mini-lessons.

Exposure

“I was absent yesterday. What did I miss?”

“We are taking our family on a week-long vacation. Can you please give us the work our daughter will be missing so she can do it while we are traveling?”

A student’s learning experience in your class cannot be reduced to a packet of “work” to be “done.” The exposure to repeated, multidimensional use of sophisticated words—words that the student is not exposed to outside of school—is arguably the most important element of education. It’s irreplaceable, albeit invisible.

“We live in a sea of words,” writes Steven A. Stahl in “How Words Are Learned Incrementally Over Multiple Exposures” (2003, 18). Words, in this metaphor, would be the fish in the sea. And there need to be a lot of them swimming around. Some fish cover territory; others remain in a niche. The sea of listening and reading (receptive language) needs to teem with fish of all kinds, for the stock to be replenished with speaking and writing (productive language). When fishermen catch a giant tuna, other smaller fish end up in the net. That is what we want to happen as we teach our targeted words explicitly: we pick up collateral words in the same net.

Don’t be afraid to speak in an elevated way to the youngest of children.

A growing body of research and classroom practice show that building a sophisticated vocabulary at an early age is also key to raising reading success—and narrowing the achievement gap. Teachers are overcoming the age-old habit of speaking to young children in simplified language only. Instead, teachers who are conscious of natural language acquisition deliberately weave higher-level word choices into primary classrooms. Whether it’s a discussion at morning meeting, informal talk at the block area, or a selection of read-aloud books, teachers are exposing younger children to language that, in many cases, exceeds the vocabulary level of a typical conversation between college graduates.

(Pappano, 2008, 1)

Any person can learn any word if that word is (1) used in a context having enough familiar words and concepts, and (2) repeated generously in the beginning stages and revisited over time.

When a word “settles in” to your brain, a bell does not ring to let you know. You may hear a word somewhere in your surroundings, just outside your consciousness. You pay attention to it on a subliminal level. You hear it again, this time in a different form. Maybe you notice it this time, but it fades, only to come into sharper focus the third time you hear it. The meaning of a word emerges, revealing more and more of itself with each context and form, until we use it correctly in several contexts and forms ourselves.

Learning words is not the same as learning, say, math. As a child learns math, she needs to build upon simpler, previously learned skills. First she learns to quantify (count), then to add, then to subtract. Learning to multiply depends upon understanding the concept of addition. Math is hierarchical. But learning words is not. You don’t need to build up from commonly known words to learn rarer ones. The relative “difficulty” of a word is not related to its meaning, but to its frequency in the language in general and in a specific person’s life and language experience. A child does not have to know or use the word wait before she can know and use the word hesitate. Nor is the word hesitate “more difficult” than the word wait. Once we understand that words are not learned developmentally, like math concepts, we understand that the sky’s the limit for our students to learn any words, however long or rare. After all, word length is not an inherent obstacle to learning a word. If it were, children would never be able to learn German, a language that attaches adjectives to nouns, resulting in very long words. It happens to be that in English, the shorter words are usually more common than the longer ones, and hence more frequent. That is the only reason why short words are considered “easier” than long words in English. We happen to be exposed to short words earlier in life, and more frequently, than we are to longer words, and that is because of the history of the English language, which added Latinate and Greek-based words (which are multisyllabic) only after the base of the language had already been established by the Anglo-Saxons. It is a quirk of history that English has so many synonyms and that we happen to learn the shorter words before the longer ones.

A workshop classroom is a student-centered classroom. As such, it is even more critical that whatever language the teacher uses is infused with words that the students would not be using themselves and would probably not be hearing outside of school. Hearing academic, interesting, specific language is, all by itself, a good reason for going to school on a given day. It’s not only what you are teaching that counts; it’s how you say it that grows vocabulary incrementally. Insofar as you are capable of providing contextualized repeated exposure to words that your students would not have heard or seen otherwise, you are the curriculum, not just the person who presides over it.

Let’s look at what happens when students are exposed to elevated discourse (by which, we mean teacher talk that is characterized by a steady flow of words that are new or partially known by students, when those words are surrounded by enough context to make them understandable). Dana A. Robertson and her colleagues (2014) cite studies that link “effective teacher talk” to:

• 
  improved reading comprehension, which includes reading for enjoyment, strategic reading for targeted information, flexibility, and stamina
• 
  improved ability to learn words from context, setting in motion a positive feedback loop
• 
  improved ability to hold conversations with teachers, which includes asking, as well as answering, questions, both about content and about the learning process (metacognition)
• 
  improved academic competency, which refers to not only having more knowledge, but also increasing capacity to learn, retain, and apply knowledge

When you think about the level of vocabulary that you use when speaking to your class, and when you think about how important it is for them to hear academic and specific language while in school, and when you think about the level of language that they are hearing outside of school, you will probably realize how much more you can do with your word choice in class.

A typical routine in your morning meetings might be to discuss the day’s weather conditions. Even if you spend two to three minutes sharing the meteorology work (and call it meteorology work) you can make this a vocabulary-rich two to three minutes. Instead of having children report that it is nice outside, you can repeat these observations back to them with more sophisticated language. For example, nice can become pleasant. You can lift the level of this language over time, too. Perhaps cloudy becomes overcast and sunny becomes clear.

So now let’s talk about what constitutes a teacher’s “skillful use of talk.” First of all, for words to be learned in context, the context itself, other than the targeted word, has to be already known. Sufficient context is known in the field of language acquisition as comprehensible input. If you’ve ever watched Wheel of Fortune, you’ve seen comprehensible input at work. As teachers, we should be using vocabulary that we suspect (or know) that our students don’t quite know yet, but we surround the unknown word with comprehensible input. If speaking this way becomes a habit, then our students are fortunate: they will be learning words effortlessly.

Comprehensible input, also known as helpful context, can take many forms. Sometimes, we reword the targeted term immediately after we use it, as we did in the previous sentence.

We can provide examples, especially for abstract concepts. We can provide visuals, which can include photographs, cartoons, and movies. We can use physicality (bodies, faces, hands) to demonstrate a concept. We can tell stories that illustrate the concept. And, to help students make the leap from receptive to productive vocabulary, we can have them do any of the preceding themselves to demonstrate what they know.

Comprehensible input can also be achieved through showing where the targeted word fits in on a continuum of words for a given concept. For example, during accountable talk time, you may have students name the characteristics of a certain character. You can support students’ articulation of their understanding by showing them how they can use specific language to describe characters. You can begin by creating a word ladder that describes just how deeply that character is stubborn, confused, compliant, naive, and so on. Let’s look at Cherry Sue from Cynthia Rylant’s Poppleton series. Students might describe Cherry Sue as “nosy.” You can write this word toward the bottom of the word ladder. Adding a continuum of words from the bottom up, you might continue to show children other words that offer variations of the same idea; perhaps above nosy is the word bothersome, and then irritating, obnoxious, and so on. In this way, you are showing students not only how they can use specific words to describe their ideas, but also how they can use specific words to deepen their—and others’—understanding of the complexity of a text’s characters. For example, suppose the concept is I don’t know what’s going on. We want to teach the word that would rightly fit into the frame: I’m ______. Suppose I think that most of the children in my class know the word confused. (If not, maybe they know the word mixed-up or lost.) I can use this comprehensible input as the teachable moment for words that express the concept of confusion in various kinds and degrees. To be a little confused is to be unsure, uncertain, unclear, fuzzy, or foggy. To be more than a little confused is to be perplexed, befuddled, or disoriented. To be seriously confused is to be baffled, or even stupefied. Then, there’s a word that describes a combination of confusion and surprise: dumbfounded! or thunderstruck! Now, I don’t expect my students to learn all of these words (all at once). I’m using the opportunity of creating an array of words around a given concept to provide comprehensible input about a targeted word and to introduce—at least touch briefly on—a few other words that students may encounter in their readings.

Words are absorbed over time. The term spaced retrieval refers to the reason why you don’t learn and retain all of the names of your students the first time you take attendance on the first day of school. Spaced retrieval is a principle of vocabulary learning that guards against forgetting a word because not enough time has gone by to let it “sink in” to your brain. “Lots of repetitions in the early stages of learning are important so that the chances of learners remembering the words will be higher. That is, there is not enough time to forget” (Coxhead, 2006, 20). Words that just scamper along in rapid succession have a way of scampering out quickly, evading recapture. But words that are revisited over a bit of time have a way of telling the brain that they’re here to stay. The brain makes neurological room for them. (Now would be a good time to point out that information that we take the time to think about—that is, reach into our brains for—tends to stay with us longer than easily gotten information. That is why it is better to try to dredge up a fact from our own internal search engines rather than reaching immediately for the nearest electronic device. Actually, the same is true for a quick lookup of a word in a dictionary rather than using brainpower to try to figure it out first.)

This Is Your Brain on Collocations

The human brain is an astonishing storage device. A person memorizes and organizes information automatically, as a by-product of exposure and engagement (we do not pay attention to boring things). And when we need information, the human brain knows how to deliver it in the form of words—not just a single word, but the word and its entourage. There’s a word for the concept that words tend to come in prefabricated units. We call it collocation. The brain stores words in units—collocations—because it’s easier and more efficient to remember them that way. The instructional implication of this happy circumstance speaks to the importance of using targeted words authentically, in meaningful contexts, rather than in isolation. Because they have at least two parts, phrases may be easier to understand and remember than single words. Let’s use the example of football jargon. A person knows the words offensive, line, and offensive line. Here’s how it works in the brain: she has heard the individual words offensive and line far more than she has heard the unit offensive line. However, when she hears offensive line, that unit of meaning is easier to process than either of the two single words because of something called access points. Offensive is one access point in the brain; line is another. But the phrase offensive line becomes yet another access point, stored in the “football department” of the brain. Individual words, if they are associated with only one definition, can be found at one access point only. But collocations—words grouped together—can be accessed through their individual components (single words) and also through the phrase itself (Dabrowska, 18). Again, I’m raising this point in a chapter about exposure to emphasize the superiority of presenting words in authentic contexts rather than as items in a list.

Distributed practice: We’ve been talking about the difference between distributed practice (revisitation over a number of days and weeks) as opposed to massed practice (intensive visitation in a short period of time, such as a day or two). An important assumption about distributed practice is that, in providing exposure to a targeted word over time (revisiting it), we will be exposing students to the word in various contexts and forms. Let’s say the word is commit for fourth grade. Full-scale distributed practice would entail hearing and seeing the word in grade-level contexts and forms (commit to a team, commit a crime, make a commitment, form a committee). While you could toss all of these examples out at once, and while it is a good idea to do so when teaching the word commit explicitly, you do need to be aware that it is only thro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Meet the Author
• Introduction: The Why and the How
• 1 Exposure
• 2 Exploration
• 3 Engagement
• 4 Energy
• Appendix A: Balanced Literacy and Reading–Writing Workshop
• Appendix B: The Coxhead List: The Academic Word List (AWL) and Spanish Cognates, Organized by Frequency
• Appendix C: The Zwier List: Basic Toolkit of Academic Vocabulary, Organized by Purpose
• Appendix D: Analysis of Forty Latin and Greek Word Roots for Mini-Lessons