Vocabulary Instruction

Time catapulted on - I loved that word from the day it appeared on my weekly vocabulary list and I put it in a sentence to read aloud.  From the moment I heard it on my tongue, it was somersaults and fireworks to me.  - Herschler, The Darkest Corner

As teachers, I'm sure we all wish that our students would have such a powerful experience with our vocabulary words.  In reality, what most likely happens, is students study the list of words they are assigned, memorize the definition, and either pass or fail the matching test we assign.  In this chapter of my book, Janet Allen challenges this outdated method of vocabulary, and challenges educators to make vocabulary instruction more meaningful.  She provides strategies to make students' interactions with those vocabulary words more meaningful.

According to Allen, Four of the key components of effective vocabulary instruction are:

• teaching individual words
• teaching strategies for learning words independently
• fostering word consciousness
• providing frequent, extensive, and varied opportunities to engage in independent reading

When teaching individual words, Allen states that one of the most important aspects of this is choosing which words to teach, something I'm sure all educators have struggled with.  Allen provides these guidelines to help with that decision:

• words that will be important for comprehension
• words that can be defined in terms known to the student
• words that are useful and interesting
• words that are of general interest but not crucial to the text

Once the words have been selected, Allen provides a variety of strategies and ideas to help make instruction meaningful.  One key point that is emphasized is the idea that "multiple encounters with a word...affect both the memorability and the usefulness of the word" (p. 96).  She gives a suggestion of beginning vocabulary instruction with a fill-in-the-blank activity.  In this activity, you copy a passage from a text, leaving out words you want them to fill in based on the context of the activity.  Students complete the activity, filling in the words and discussing them.  She then goes into a possible sentence activity, in which students work with a partner to write sentences they think they might encounter that contains the words from the fill-in-the-blank activity.  This provides students two opportunities to work with those words, before even encountering them in the reading. 

All in all, this chapter really opened my eyes with the theory and activities behind vocabulary instruction.