Vocabulary Readings

     The articles that we read for today are all  focused on building children's vocabulary.  The article, "Vocabulary Lessons" discusses four ways to implement vocabulary instruction in the classroom.  These four practices are developing word awareness and love of words through word play, delivering explicit instruction to develop important vocabulary, building strategies for independence, and engaging students actively with a wide range of books.  The article "The Vocabulary-Rich Classroom:  Modeling Sophisticated Word use to Promote Word Consciousness and Vocabulary Growth"  discussed the importance of the teacher using modeling in a purposeful manner in order to help the students to use a more sophisticated vocabulary.  The article uses two different teachers as examples, a kindergarten and a fourth grade classroom.  The last article "The Early Catastrophe"  outlines a study that was conducted on children from poverty or welfare in comparison to working class and upper SES families to see the effect of the parents vocabulary and speaking habits in the home on the size of the children's later vocabularies when they went to school.  The article found that the amount of words spoken to the child is a good predictor of the size of their later vocabularies.  Chapter 6 in Classrooms That Work contained  many great ideas for lessons and exercises that will be so useful in promoting not only vocabulary enhancement but also in helping students how to connect and relate new vocabulary words to their own everyday lives and experiences.

 

     The overall message that struck me with the articles and the chapter reading that was assigned this week is that researchers agree that the development of a strong vocabulary is essential to children’s success with literacy but that there are many teachers who are unsure of the best way to enhance their students’ vocabularies.  I think that there were many great ideas in these readings for ways to make learning words a fun and engaging activity for students and I plan on referring back to these ideas when I have my own class to teach.  I was disturbed by some of the research in the article on the 30 million word gap and it stressed to me the importance of teaching vocabulary explicitly in the classroom especially in schools where the majority of students come form poverty.