Word study guides

By Doug Buehl

Experts fear that the world may be on the verge of an avian flu pandemic.

It is certainly interesting how language works. After several months of headlines and feature articles, as well as ongoing stories from the news networks, we are well aware of the potential dangers of the “bird flu.” But in addition, perhaps imperceptibly, we have comfortably “adopted” various buzzwords from the media deluge about this possibly impending health risk.

Avian and pandemic are particularly good examples of this phenomenon of vocabulary acquisition. Most of us would agree that these two terms were probably on the fringes of our working vocabularies. Some of us may have had an awareness of them, although for many people they may have been totally unknown words. In all likelihood, they rarely crept into our regular discourse with others.

Yet, after being bombarded by references to avian and pandemic these last several months, many people can now confidently use both terms, when talking about the bird flu as well as in more general contexts. The vocabularies of much of the population have expanded!

Many of the important words we want students to master, however, lack the repetitions over time and the rich meaningful contexts that our bird flu terms exemplify. Instead, students are confronted with vocabulary that is often completely novel and which may appear only sporadically in their lives afterwards. As a result, their learning of these words is tenuous, and many key words go by without ever really entering a student’s working vocabulary.

The Strategy
In recent Reading Room columns, the importance of vocabulary learning, especially in building academic background knowledge, has been emphasized. Researchers have established that a major cause of reading comprehension difficulties, especially in academic subjects, arises from vocabulary weaknesses.

The May Reading Room column advocated “wide reading” as an essential strategy for building academic background knowledge. Wide reading is also a necessary, although not sufficient, step for enhancing vocabulary. Feldman and Kinsella (2004) review the research on building vocabulary through extensive reading, and conclude that in general vocabulary learning is a byproduct of encountering unknown words in print and developing conjectures on their meanings. They argue that a vocabulary development program that is most effective must combine increasing the “reading volume” of students with explicit vocabulary instruction.

Step 1: Determine which words are most worthy of instructional time. Feldman and Kinsella caution that many words highlighted in textbooks or by teachers do not deserve instructional attention, and other mainline and essential words are left for students to infer a meaning. They offer the following guidelines for selecting high-utility words for instruction:

Big Idea words – content area terms that are the core of the academic language of a specific discipline. These would include key conceptual science terms, social studies terms, math terms, language arts terms, and so forth. Words such as seismic, feudalism, equation, and verb fall under the category of “big idea” words.
Academic Tool Kit words – terms which students will meet again and again, across subject matter texts. Words such as contrast, function, environment and perspective pop up continuously in written texts; yet these words are typically not taught, and as a result students develop hazy or imprecise meanings of highly crucial and recurring vocabulary.
Disciplinary Tool Kit words – words common to the study of an academic discipline and used frequently in the discourse of a subject area. Terms like alliance and policy in social studies, or hypothesis and dilute in science are again words that students may have to figure out totally on their own, and as a result accrue only indistinct meanings.
Polysemous words – word that have multiple meanings, and often very specific meanings in an academic discipline. Matter has a distinct meaning in science that contrasts a great deal from its general usage; mean in mathematics does not mean anything close to the second usage of the word mean in this sentence.

For example, a history teacher would likely chose Big Idea words like segregation, integration, and Jim Crow laws when studying the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But Academic Tool Kit words, such as those related to argumentation: contention, proposition, and counteract would also be useful to the discussions of people’s beliefs and justifications for actions. Disciplinary Tool Kit words might include discriminate, boycott, and martyr. Feldman and Kinsella argue that most students would benefit from explicit instruction of all these terms.

Step 2: Next, take students through a fast-paced lesson that involves explicit instruction of a key word. When introducing the word, especially with younger children, Feldman and Kinsella emphasize that students need to actually pronounce the new word. Usually, the individual in the classroom who gets the most practice saying a key word is the teacher; instead students need to begin the process of moving the word into their spoken vocabulary. Especially if the word is likely to be mispronounced, because of complicated spelling for example, students will shy away from using it themselves. Engaging students in a choral response can begin to build the auditory and muscle memory that speaking a word, not merely reading it silently, involves. Experiment with other ways, especially with older students, to include pronunciation into vocabulary learning.

Step 3: Explain the target word. Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2002) recommend explanations that include “you,” “someone,” and “something:” When you boycott something, you avoid having anything to do with it. Some baseball fans were upset with the taxes to build Miller Park, so they (pause to let students say the word boycotted) going to Milwaukee Brewer games.

Continue developing a meaningful understanding of the new word with additional examples: My sister had an argument with our parents and now she (pause to let students say the word boycotts) family gatherings. Because the store owner is rude to young people, all the kids now (pause – boycott) the store .

Step 4: Further elaboration of the new word asks students to begin to supply their own examples: Think of a case you know where someone boycotted something. Or think of a situation that you believe justifies a boycott. Challenge students to generate examples that involve different contexts from the ones that have been mentioned so far (such as a family or business boycott).

Visual representations of a new word can be especially powerful. Ask students to quickly sketch an image that crystallizes their understanding of the word, or some key aspect of it.

Step 5: Have students keep records in their class notebooks of the new words you devote to explicit instruction. Feldman and Kinsella recommend a word study guide that features a graphic organizer that tracks facets of a word’s meaning. (See Word Study Guide example below .) Students can be expected to add words as they are taught them as an integral class assignment.

Advantages
An instructional focus on a word may only take a few minutes, but the clarification of key vocabulary for students has enormous payoffs in reading comprehension of classroom texts and learning of the course content. In addition:

Students receive regular modeling of effective methods to thoroughly learn new words on their own.
Students gradually build their academic background knowledge, making them better prepared to learn academic subjects.
The gap between students with extensive and weak vocabularies can become less dramatic.

Further Resource:
Beck, I., McKeown, M. & Kucan, L (2002) Bringing Words To Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction. New York: Guilford Press.

Feldman, K. & Kinsella, K. (2004) Narrowing the Language Gap: The Case For Explicit Vocabulary Instruction. Scholastic Professional Paper. New York: Scholastic Inc.