Classroom Application for this chapter: We are learning to find ways to expand our students vocabulary and develop their interest in learning words. I would use word walls/posters to go hand in hand with the different books we read (Kindergarten level). We could categorize them under different titles such as animals, common words, weather, etc. The book talks about Academic Vocabulary; that would be a fun way to use the posters as well. I think it would be fun for the students to choose which titles they would like to use and which words will go under those titles. (So I’ve been missing classroom application over the last few of these. I didn’t quite understand what you meant by classroom application. I messaged you but things are a bit crazy. If this is what you were expecting then just let me know. If it’s not, then please correct me so I can properly update these. Thank you!)
Academic Vocabulary: words that are found in books and textbooks that students read; teachers use them in minilessons and discussions, and students use them in classroom assignments and are expected to understand them in high-stakes tests.
Three tiers of words: a tool to assist teachers in identifying academic vocabulary and choosing which words to study.
- Tier 1: Basic Words: Common words that are used socially, in informal conversation at home and on the playground. (animal, clean, laughing)
- Tier 2: Academic Vocabulary: Words that have a wide application in school and are used more frequently in written than in oral language. Some are related to literacy concepts – apostrophe, paragraph, preposition, or they’re found in literature, such as greedy, keen, evidence.
- Tier 3: Specialized Terms: Technical words that are content-specific and often abstract, (minuend, osmosis, suffrage). They aren’t used frequently enough to devote time to teaching them when they come up during language arts. But are important during content area classes.
Word Wall: a place on a board or poster where common words are written as reference for students to see and pull from.
Semantic Feature analysis: a strategy that engages students in reading assignments by asking them to relate to key words/features of text.
Levels of Word Knowledge: students develop knowledge about a word gradually, through repeated oral and written exposure to it. They move from not knowing it all all to recognizing that they have seen the word to a partial knowledge or general sense of the meaning. Finally they fully understand the word.
- Unknown word: students don’t recognize the word
- Initial Recognition: students have seen or heard the word or can pronounce it, but don’t know the meaning of it.
- Partial word knowledge: students know the meaning of the word and can use it in a sentence.
- Full word knowledge: students know more than one meaning and can use the word in several ways.
Word Consciousness: increases students word knowledge and their interest in learning academic vocabulary. Students who have word consciousness exemplify these characteristics:
- students use words skillfully, understanding the nuances of word meanings.
- Students gain a deep appreciation of words and value them
- Students are aware of differences between social and academic language
- Students understand the power of word choice
- Students are motivated to learn the meaning of unfamiliar words.
Wordplay ideas: through riddles, jokes, puns, songs, patterns, encouragements….
- Alliteration. Students repeat words with the same beginning consonant or vowel sound in words within a phrase or sentence. (ex. now or never)
- Eponyms. Students recognize that peoples names can become words. (ex. teddy bear)
- Hyperbole. Students create exaggerated statements.
- Onomatopoeia. Students use words that imitate sounds.
- Oxymorons. Students combine two normally contradictory words to create a paradoxical image. ex. pretty ugly.
- Palindromes. Students notice words and phrases that read the same forward and backwards. ex. mom, dad.
- Personification. students endow inanimate objects with human traits or abilities. (ex. the old cars engine coughed)
- Portmanteau. students commonly use words that were created by fusing two words to combine the meaning of both words. (smoke + fog = smog)
- Spoonerisms. students switch sounds in words, often with a humorous effect.
Multiple Meanings of words: many words have more than one meaning. For some words, multiple meanings develop for the noun and verb forms, but sometimes additional meanings develop through wordplay and figurative language. (ex. bank – a place you get money, a snow bank, the bank of a river…)
Synonyms: words with nearly the same meanings.
Antonyms: words that express the opposite meanings of one another.
Homonyms: are confusing because even though these words have different meanings, they’re either pronounced or spelled the same as other words.
Homophones: are words that sound alike but are spelled differently.
Homographs: words with identical spellings but different meanings and pronunciations, such as the noun and verb forms of wind and the noun and adjective forms of minute. (other examples, live, read, bow, conduct, present, and record).
Root words and Affixes: These show students how words word.
- Root words are Free morphemes when they’re words. Some root words are whole words, and sometimes they are word parts. (ex. cent, century).
- Affixes are bound morphemes that are added to words: Prefixes are placed at the beginning, and suffixes are located at the end.
Etymologies: word histories and where those words originated from. The history behind a word and where it came from.
Words can have literal and figurative meanings. idioms are a group of words, such as “in hot water” that have special meaning. A similie is a comparison signaled by the use of like or a. (ex. the crown was as roudy as.. ) in contrast a metaphor compares two things by implying that one is the other, without using like or as. (ex. the children were frisky puppies playing in the yard)
Vocabulary instruction plays an important role in balanced literacy classrooms because of the crucial role it plays in both reading and writing achievement. Components of VI:
- immerse students in words through listening, talking, reading, and writing
- teach specific words through active involvement and multiple encounters with words
- teach word-learning strategies so students can figure out the meanings of unfamiliar words
- develop students word consciousness, their awareness of and interest in words
Explicit instruction occurs when teachers teach students about academic vocabulary, (tier 2 words). Teachers provide multiple encounters with words, present a variety of information, including definitions, contexts, examples, and related words; and involve students in word-study activities so that they have multiple opportunities to interact with words.
Teachers use minilessons to teach students about specific words. These are small lessons that provide information about words, including both definitions and contextual information, and engage students in activities to get them to think about and use words orally and in reading and writing.
Word Study Activities are made to get students to examine new words and think more deeply about them as they participate in activities. These can be visual representations of words, in others they categorize words they have learned.
- word posters
- word maps
- possible sentences: after reviewing the definitions of a set of words, students work with classmates to craft sentences using the words and afterward share them.
- dramatizing words
- word sorts
- word chains
- Semantic Feature Analysis: students learn the meanings of conceptually related words by examining their characteristics. (ex. planets in the solar system) students analyze each word, characteristic by characteristic, and they put checkmarks, circles, and question marks in each cell to indicate whether the word represents that characteristic.
Word-learning strategies: used to assist a student while they are reading when they come across an unfamiliar word. They can reread the sentence, analyze root words and affixes in the word, check a dictionary, sound out the word, look for context clues in the sentence, skip the word and keep reading, or ask the teacher or a classmate to help.
Figuring out unfamiliar words: use context clues, some provide information about the meaning of the word, and others provide information about the part of speech and how the word is used in a sentence. Modeling words through read-alouds. Analyzing word parts and how they function. Such as prefixes, suffixes, and root words assist. Checking the dictionary. Incidental word learning during independent reading.
Assessing student vocabulary knowledge: can be done through a four-step instruction-assessment cycle during literature and thematic units.
- Step 1: Planning – teachers consider students current level of vocabulary knowledge, identify the academic words they’ll teach, and plan minilessons and word-study activities.
- Step 2: Monitoring – through the use of Observations and Conferences to see when the instruction is effective or needs modifications.
- Step 3: Evaluating – Rubrics, Quickwrites, wordsorts, and visual representations
- step 4: Reflecting– taking the time at the end of a unit to reflect on their teaching and the effectiveness of the instruction.
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