Wall Displays Gallery of Words
By Doug Buehl,
Madison East High School teacher
Member, Wisconsin State Reading Association
January 2003
The word “Door” greeted me on my arrival home
from school, years back, as I approached the entrance to my house. Affixed
to the front door was a narrow plastic strip with the word “door”
embossed upon it. “Door” . . . hmmm. . . appropriate enough,
I guess. Looking up, I next spied “window” on another strip,
yes, fastened to the window. What’s up, now?
Once inside, things became readily apparent when I entered
the bathroom. “Sink,” “mirror,” “tub,” “faucet,”
and of course “toilet” were awaiting me. Clearly, my wife had
spent her day busy with that new label-maker, spinning the alphabet dial
to punch out word after word on plastic tape, to be clipped, peeled, and
stuck to an object. Room after room, our home was now primed for our two
fledgling readers, preschoolers immersed in a richness of vocabulary.
My wife, obviously, had been reading Parents Magazine again . . . .
Our family’s episode with the label-maker was a
playful way to introduce a vast array of sight vocabulary in highly contextualized
settings – words in print were directly related to the items they
named. It wasn’t that my wife and I were planning to actually teach
these words; we were merely displaying them for our young sons as a natural
part of their environment. (It’s interesting how quickly they both
learned the word “toilet,” for example; repeated sightings matter!)
Vocabulary researchers argue that children first learn
many commonplace words through repeated exposures – in books read
to them, from daily encounters with cereal boxes, baseball cards, and
video cassette jackets; through various meaningful community experiences
such as the “stop” on every stop sign; and from those ubiquitous
fast food marquees. The dynamic is inescapable: Frequently seen words
have a higher probability of appearing in a child’s working vocabulary.
The Strategy
Classroom teachers can take advantage of this phenomenon to enhance the
vocabulary development of their students. In particular, the learning
of content-specific vocabulary can be supported by transforming the classroom
into a gallery of high-profile words.
Step 1: A baseline step in providing a vocabulary-rich
classroom environment is teacher modeling. Teachers can model usage of
both general as well as content-specific vocabulary. When teachers use
a modicum of unfamiliar words as a natural part of daily discourse, students
begin to develop a comfort zone with adopting these words for their own
speaking. Teacher modeling of new vocabulary is especially effective when
these words are embedded in language packed with contextual prompts:
“The proliferation of new construction on the far
east side of town is very striking. It seems each time I drive by there
are more and more new houses, businesses, and streets.”
Step 2: One systematic way to consistently integrate
new vocabulary into classroom discourse is the word-of-the-day strategy.
Select a series of words from a variety of sources – your reading,
the students’ reading, daily word lists or calendars, specialty words
(connected with events or themes, like culinary terms), even SAT or ACT
prep terms – and set up a focus on a different word for each day.
As students enter the classroom every day, they notice a new word on the
chalkboard, with a definition, synonyms, and a couple of key sentences
that cue students on using the word.
Many students will develop the habit of glancing at
the word as they walk into the room, and informal discussions about the
word frequently result. Some students will recognize the word and share
where they have met it before. Others will raise questions. Teachers might
start the day with a little word-play before moving on, and the word may
pop up organically as part of the talk during the day. In addition, students
typically comment on the reappearance of these words outside of school
and in their personal reading.
Step 3: A logical extension of a daily focus
on targeted vocabulary is the word wall strategy (Green, 1993). Areas
of the classroom such as a vacant wall or a bulletin board are designated
as word walls. Word-of-the-day vocabulary can remain as part of the backdrop
of the classroom when they are printed on strips of construction paper
and added to the word wall.
Word walls are an especially powerful method for reinforcing
content-specific vocabulary.
For example, an orchestra teacher might use a word wall
to support the learning of significant musical terminology. Students examining
a new composition notice the term “cantabile” marked above a
phrase of music. The composer has provided this key term to assist students
in their interpretation of that phrase, so after the teacher discusses
the meaning (the music needs to have a “singing” quality), the
word “cantabile” is written on the front of a sheet of paper
folded in half and placed on the word wall.
Students passing by who have forgotten the meaning merely
have to lift the word flap to read the definition written on the inside
half of the paper. As new terms are encountered, and previous terms reviewed,
the word wall grows and becomes an essential classroom resource.
A science teacher might use a word wall to build a classroom
reservoir of essential terms related to key concepts that will recur over
the course of the year. Secondary terms can be pruned out as a new unit
interjects new words for intensive study.
A variation of this strategy invites students to select
words from their reading to be added to a word wall. Students can be asked
to identify interesting or important words from a short story or novel,
for example, to be included on a word wall.
Step 4: Words walls can become the center of
vocabulary review activities, and Allen (1999) reported that words featured
on the word wall began occurring with greater frequency in student writing.
In addition, Allen creates word-play games that center on word wall terms
as a means to periodically reinforce student vocabulary growth.
Posted December 20, 2002