Building a Vocabulary: Learning New Words Can Be a Gradual Process
By Doug Buehl,
Madison East High School teacher
Member, Wisconsin State Reading Association
Researchers estimate that school-age children learn, on average, 3000
to 4000 new words each year. Obviously, only a modest portion of those
newly mastered words were a result of direct instruction in classrooms.
Students learn the rest through natural immersion in reading and other
literacy activities.
Strategies that help students monitor their vocabulary development can
stimulate this ongoing process of broadening one’s vocabulary.
The strategy
The Word Knowledge Rating activity (Blachowicz and Fisher, 1996) is an
excellent strategy for developing sensitivity to the words students meet
in various environmental contexts. Knowledge of a particular word is not
an either/or dynamic. Instead, we accumulate gradations of meaning that
range from: cognizance of the existence of the word; to a hazy sense of
where this word appears; to an imprecise “working definition”;
to a confident inclusion of the word into our productive (speaking and
writing) vocabularies; to a rich, varied, and complex understanding of
the nuances and connotations of the word as might be applicable to a multitude
of contexts.
Step 1: Select words from a passage that students have read or will be
reading, and ask them to rate their knowledge of each word. The categories
are: I know the word and am comfortable using it; I have a hunch what
the word means, but I don't use it; I have seen this word but don’t
know it, or I have never seen this word before.
Interestingly, students will sometimes slot words into the “have
never seen” category even when the words are taken from material
they read a day earlier. How could students have never seen words that
had just appeared before their eyes in a reading?
Actually, this is a frequently occurring phenomenon, and it makes sense
for students to “not see” unknown words as they read. Spend
some time discussing reasons why this happens to readers:
- Readers do not need to identify every word to make sense of what they
read – usually the context provides enough general guidance of
meaning.
- Readers become deeply involved in the overall story or message of
a text and do not pay careful attention to specific elements such as
unknown vocabulary.
- Readers may be reading to obtain a general sense of a passage and
they skip anything that is unfamiliar.
- Struggling readers find attention to difficult words too taxing and
time-consuming so they read as though those words were not in front
of them.
Word Knowledge Rating activities need not lead to the step students have
come to expect – look up each definition in the dictionary. In this
case, students are not expected to immediately develop mastery of these
words. Instead, they are being conditioned to “notice” these
words as a first step to integrating them into their personal vocabularies.
Step 2: Of course, providing students with lists of new words from their
reading is not as powerful as requiring them to take on this responsibility
themselves. Ask students to assume the habit of “reading with a pencil.”
As they read various class materials, as well as materials on their own,
they should lightly circle unknown words. Emphasize that they should not
necessarily slow down and try to construct a meaning at this point. Instead,
they are merely registering that they have seen this word.
Lightly marking new words, even if they remain unknown, is an excellent
way to nurture vocabulary growth through natural reading. There is a strong
correlation between widespread reading and an extensive personal vocabulary.
Researchers estimate that by the time an unknown word is encountered in
10 different contexts, a reader has figured out enough about that word
to begin to include it in speaking and writing. Few individuals with extensive
vocabularies reached that state by constantly interrupting the flow of
their reading to look up unknown words in the dictionary.
Step 3: Next, have students begin to create their own personal Word Bank.
They can dedicate a section of a notebook (or perhaps an entire notebook)
to those new words that are appearing in their lives.
To encourage students to vigilantly seek vocabulary for their word banks,
set goals, such as 10 new words each week.
Notebooks can be periodically checked to assure that students are on
target with identifying unknown words.
Posted May 26, 2000