Teaching Word Meanings

Steven A. Stahl, William E. Nagy

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781317433910
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Pedagogía
• Categoria: Educación general

Learning new words is foundational to success in school and life. Researchers have known for years that how many word meanings a student knows is one of the strongest predictors of how well that student will understand text and be able to communicate through writing. This book is about how children learn the meanings of new words (and the concepts they convey) and how teachers can be strategic in deciding which words to teach, how to teach them, and which words not to teach at all.This book offers a comprehensive approach to vocabulary instruction. It offers not just practical classroom activities for teaching words (though plenty of those are included), but ways that teachers can make the entire curriculum more effective at promoting students' vocabulary growth. It covers the 'why to' and 'when to' as well as the 'how to' of teaching word meanings. Key features of this exciting new book include: * A variety of vocabulary activities. Activities for teaching different kinds of words such as high frequency words, high utility words, and new concepts, are explained and illustrated.
* Guidelines for choosing words. A chart provides a simple framework built around seven basic categories of words that helps teachers decide which words to teach and how to teach them.
* Word learning strategies. Strategies are offered that will help students use context, word parts, and dictionaries more effectively.
* Developing Word Consciousness. Although specific vocabulary instruction is fully covered, the primary goal of this book is to develop students' independent interest in words and their motivation to learn them.
* Integrated Vocabulary Instruction. Teachers are encouraged to improve the reading vocabularies of their students by looking for opportunities to integrate vocabulary learning into activities that are undertaken for other purposes.

I

The Lay of the Land

Part I of this book is called “The Lay of the Land.” The goal of this book is to help teachers promote large-scale, long-term vocabulary growth in their students. Like most other aspects of teaching, this is a difficult and complex task. Success depends on understanding as well as on effort. This part of the book aims to provide the big picture.

Chapter 1 is called “The Importance of Vocabulary.” One reason that vocabulary is important is because of its role in reading comprehension, which in turn is essential for the rest of students’ learning. To be academically successful, students must have large reading vocabularies. The other main reason for the importance of vocabulary is that the students who need your help the most—whether because of family resources, or the use of a different language at home, or any other factors—are very likely going to also have challenges mastering the vocabulary that is essential for success in school.

Chapter 2, “Vocabulary Knowledge, Reading Comprehension, and Readability,” explores the reasons why children who know more words also understand text better. It may sound obvious why this is the case, but there are actually a rather complex set of connections between vocabulary and reading ability. Each of these connections tells us something about what an effective approach to promoting vocabulary growth must look like.

Chapter 3, “Problems and Complexities,” gives the bad news. Helping students develop large reading vocabularies is a difficult task, for a number of reasons. If you don’t know the nature, and the severity, of the problems facing the students, it may be hard to see the need for the solutions, or to devote the energy necessary to make them work.

Chapter 4 presents “A Comprehensive Approach to Vocabulary Learning.” We can’t offer some simple magic bullet to solve students’ vocabulary problems, but we can provide a coherent plan. This chapter is, in effect, an overview of the rest of the book, which presents the various components of a comprehensive, multifaceted approach to helping students learn the thousands of words they need to know to be successful in school and beyond.

1

The Importance of Vocabulary

Polonius: What’s that you read, m’lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

(Shakespeare, 1600–01, Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii)

Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.

(Stoppard, 1967, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, p. 41)

Words are so pervasive in our life, so central to being human, that we do not often stop to reflect on their value and power. Like the proverbial fish that is unaware of the water in which it swims, we are seldom conscious of how much of our experience is in terms of language.

The words that we use both express and shape who we are. Our vocabulary, even more than our accent, gives away our social and educational background. As a major factor in determining what we can understand, it opens or closes access to sources of information that will impact our future.

This is a book about vocabulary—about how schoolchildren learn words, and about how teachers can help them learn more. We need to make it clear at the outset, that by vocabulary we will be referring to students’ knowledge of word meanings. We distinguish this from word recognition, which involves recognizing the written form of words. Likewise, we are not talking about sight vocabulary, which is recognition of words “by sight” or automatically. Word recognition, sight vocabulary, and decoding are important topics in their own right, but in this book we are concerned with how students acquire new meanings—that is, how they learn new concepts, and how they learn new words for familiar concepts.

Why a book about vocabulary? Because words are the tools we use to access our background knowledge, express ideas, and learn new concepts. The words children know will determine how well they can comprehend texts, in the upper elementary grades, in middle and high school, and in college. Reading is far more than recognizing words and remembering their meanings, but if the reader does not know the meanings of a sufficient proportion of the words in the text, comprehension is impossible.

The importance of vocabulary knowledge for reading comprehension would seem self-evident to anyone who has ever read a jargon-filled text and was left scratching his or her head. Here is an example from an early draft of a paper written by one of us with a colleague:

The findings of our study also reveal that there is nothing especially difficult about setting up a mental representation for a new lexical item as presumably children would have to do for unknown words. For example, for localist versions of connectionist viewpoints, it seems probable that one would first have to create a new lexical node before orthographic, phonological, and semantic information could become connected with it. (reference withheld because of embarrassment)

To understand this paragraph, one needs to know the meanings of words like connectionist, lexical, node, and so on. Without that knowledge, this paragraph is gibberish. This passage illustrates one of the oldest findings in educational research—the strong relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Correlational studies, readability research, and experimental studies have all found strong and reliable relationships between the difficulty of the words in a text and text comprehension (Anderson & Freebody, 1981). Vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension correlate so highly (in the 0.85 to 0.95 range) so that some authors have argued that they are psychometrically identical (e.g., Carver, 2003; R. Thorndike, 1974). Others have found that prose literacy has modest but significant correlations with occupational status and participation in society (Guthrie & Hutchinson, 1991). It may overstate the case to say that vocabulary knowledge is central to children’s and adults’ success in school and in life, but not by much.

The English language, with its penchant for borrowing and its worldwide use, probably has a stock of words larger than that of any other language. It is not surprising, then, that among speakers of English, a large vocabulary is one of the most important parts of verbal proficiency. In fact, the statistical relationship between vocabulary size and intelligence is so strong that a vocabulary test alone is often used in place of a full-scale test of verbal IQ (Anderson & Freebody, 1981).

Vocabulary is closely associated not just with intelligence, but also with knowledge. Although “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” a person knowing not only rose but nasturtium, bluebonnet, black-eyed Susans, and so on understands more about flowers than does a person who knows only flower and perhaps a few common flower names.

A person who knows more words can speak, and even think, more precisely about the world. A person who knows the terms scarlet and crimson and azure and indigo can think about colors in a different way than a person who is limited to red and blue. A person who knows about balks, bunts and the double switch can think about baseball in a different way than a person who doesn’t. A person who can label someone as pusillanimous or a recreant can better describe a person’s cowardly behavior. Words divide the world; the more words we have, the more complex ways we can think about the world.

For teachers, vocabulary is important most of all because of the huge differences that exist among their students. Differences in word knowledge occur early in life, and there are dramatic differences in the exposure to new words among families of different social classes. One study (Hart & Risley, 1995) found that children in the households of professional parents were exposed to 50% more words than were children in working-class families, and twice as many words as children in homes receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Hart and Risley noted that the poorest children had concomitantly fewer words spoken to them, with more words spoken in imperative sentences and fewer in descriptive or elaborative sentences. As an outcome of these differences in exposure, the children from the most advantaged homes had receptive vocabularies five times larger than did the children from homes with the lowest incomes. The picture that Hart and Risley presented was that of a dramatic gap in word knowledge between well off and poor, one that begins early in life and threatens to grow with time.

This does not mean that children from poor homes are condemned to linguistic poverty. On the contrary, it is not hard to find successful people from humble beginnings. Education can make a difference. Some studies have found that good school experiences can overcome the effects of inadequate home experiences (Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, & Hemphill, 1992). Going to school does not guarantee vocabulary growth; other studies have found no impact of school attendance on young children’s vocabularies (Cantalini, 1987; Morrison, Williams, & Massetti, 1998). However, teachers are clearly in a position to have a powerful impact on children’s language development (Dickinson & Smith, 1994).

Vocabulary is also one of the primary challenges facing students who come from non-English-speaking homes. Students from low-income or non-English-speaking homes come to schools with rich funds of knowledge and experience (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) that teachers need to recognize and build on. However, ultimately success in school requires linking personal knowledge and experience to the vocabulary of the school. A child may achieve fluency in conversational English in a year or so; but even under optimal circumstances, it may take an English language learner 5 or more years to catch up in terms of the vocabulary of academic English (Collier, 1989; Cummins, 1994).

Past electronic revolutions—telephone, radio, and television—increased the role of oral language in communication. However, despite the increasing use of multimedia, the current wave of information technology shows no signs of making written language an endangered species. Although the word literacy is continually being redefined to take into account changes in the contexts in which people encounter written language and the purposes for which they use it, the level of literacy one needs in order to participate fully in society continues to rise.

Perhaps one of the most important reasons why teachers need to pay attention to vocabulary is that vocabulary knowledge is cumulative. The more words you know, the easier it is to learn yet more words. For example, Shefelbine (1990) looked at children’s ability to infer the meanings of new words they encountered from context. He found that one of the biggest obstacles facing the less successful children was that they didn’t know the meanings of the other words in the context—the words that were supposed to provide the clues for the meanings of the new words. This is a classic case of a “Matthew effect” described by Stanovich (1986). The notion of a Matthew effect comes from the passage from the gospel in which it is foretold that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. Children with weak vocabularies in the early grades will not be able to take advantage of richer texts due to their lack of word knowledge. Because they cannot understand more difficult texts, they will learn fewer words and hence fall further and further behind. Thus, individual differences in vocabulary size, and vocabulary differences related to socioeconomic status or home language, tend to widen over time. Students with smaller vocabularies will fall progressively further behind—unless something is done.

Although the importance of vocabulary seems obvious enough to us, this perception is not universally held. Every year, Reading Today (the bi-monthly newspaper of the International Reading Association) includes an article on “What’s Hot, What’s Not.” A topic is “hot” if it is judged (by a panel of “literacy leaders”) to be receiving increasing and positive attention. In the December 2003/January 2004 poll, for the fourth time in 4 years, vocabulary/word meanings was considered by the majority of the leaders to be “not hot.” That is, in their estimation, people in reading-related professions were not especially interested in or concerned about this topic (Cassidy & Cassidy, 2003/2004).

The opinion that vocabulary is “not hot” is backed up by research. A number of studies have shown that, in general, very little classroom time is given to vocabulary instruction (e.g., Durkin, 1978/1979; Scott, Jamieson-Noel, & Asselin, 2003).

Why is vocabulary instruction relatively unpopular? We think that there are two main reasons for this. One is the tendency to treat word-level reading processes and higher-level processes as “either/or” rather than as “both/and.” That is, some teachers think they should be focusing on issues of interpretation and critical thinking instead of vocabulary. Another reason for the neglect of vocabulary is the tendency to think of vocabulary instruction in terms of traditional methods that have been shown to be ineffective—for example, “memorize the definition, and write a sentence using the word.”

It should be noted, however, that rating vocabulary as “not hot” did not reflect what these literacy leaders thought should be the case. On the contrary, vocabulary/word meanings was also listed as a topic that “should be hot” (Cassidy & Cassidy, 2002/2003, 2003/2004). This judgment that vocabulary should be a hot topic is consistent with the National Reading Panel’s decision to consider vocabulary as one of five key areas to be addressed in reading instruction.

What needs to be done? That’s what the rest of the book is about.

We need to be honest with you, though: Helping students gain large reading vocabularies is neither simple nor easy. An effective approach to promoting vocabulary growth has to be multifaceted and sustained. To make the effort that is needed, you have to know not only the importance of vocabulary knowledge to educational success, but also the complexity and difficulty of the vocabulary problems that many students face. In other words, we think that it’s best to tell you the bad news before we tell you the good news. The next two chapters, then, are devoted to complexity and difficulty. Chapter 2 is about the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. The common-sense understanding of this relationship—that knowing more words makes you a better reader—is true, but only a part of a complex picture. These complexities have a lot to tell us about what makes for effective vocabulary instruction. Chapter 3 is about additional complexities and problems facing any attempt to help students attain substantial growth in their reading vocabularies. Please bear with us, though. It’s essential to understand the nature of the problem before you decide on a solution.

2

Vocabulary Knowledge, Reading Comprehension, and Readability

The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

(Mark Twain, 1888 letter to George Bainton, published in Bainton, 1890, The Art of Authorship, pp. 87–88)

One of the main reasons teachers are interested in improving students’ vocabularies is to help make them better readers. In fact, it has been known for a long time that the size of a person’s vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of how well that person can understand what he or she reads (Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Davis, 1944). This relationship between vocabulary and comprehension, which is hardly surprising, seems to have an obvious interpretation: Having a big vocabulary makes you a better reader. The instructional implication also seems obvious: If you teach students more words, they will understand text better.

This implication isn’t completely off track. In fact, one of our main goals in promoting students’ vocabulary growth is to make them better able to understand what they read. However, the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension i...