In her article Janet Allen wanted to show us how to push students to the in-depth knowledge of words and how to make words meaningful to students and relevant to their worlds by devoting time to vocabulary instruction.
Word knowledge is critical to comprehension. We learn new words through reading, writing, listening, and talking. Readers must know what most words mean before they can understand what they are reading.
Teachers should explain to students why some words are more difficult to understand than others. Beck (2002) identified three tiers of words for vocabulary instruction.
Tier I: high frequency words learned through daily spoken language and which rarely requires instruction in school.
Tier II: rich words, students encounter these words through listening or reading in a wide variety of texts. This is where teachers should focus their vocabulary instruction.
Tier III: lower frequency words, learned in the content area. These words are important for understanding new concepts taught in the content area. Students need strategies to independently acquire new words, How to use word parts to figure out the meanings of words in text. Knowing some common prefixes, suffixes and root words can help students learn the meanings of many new words.
During independent reading, students need to learn how to be critical readers and decoders, how to use context clues to determine word meanings and how to use dictionaries to deepen knowledge of word meanings. Students need multiple exposures to a word to learn it well.
Teachers should teach specialized vocabulary before beginning content area and help students identify unfamiliar vocabulary words. Help students to explore how the words are related or connected to each other. Use word walls for listing new or unfamiliar words so students can see and use them often. Use memory links to help students remember words such as visuals and graphic organizers.
As a math teacher, I will make vocabulary knowledge a part of every lesson. Mathematics vocabulary can be an obstacle to success in mathematical problem solving, to solve word problems students need to understand the vocabulary used in the word problems. An understanding of the words contained in word problems is essential to finding a solution. Some words are best learned through direct and visual experience and by making connections. Vocabulary plays an important role in a student’s ability to understand daily lessons. Teachers must know where in the curriculum to introduce vocabulary words and when and how to help students make key connection that builds on prior knowledge. Students learn mathematics best by using it, understanding the language of math gives students the skills they need to assimilate new math concepts.
I wonder if high schools mathematics teachers can make mathematics vocabulary comprehensible to all their students by devoting a reasonably balanced amount of time to mathematics vocabulary practice?
I nominate Jennifer to be the next Sherpa.
1 comment:
The question of time is endemic to the teaching profession. There will ALWAYS be the question of whether there's enough time in a day, a week, a month, a year, a curriculum to do such and such. Another important question is what happens to our subject areas if we DON'T pay some attention to the vocabulary that is the foundational support of conceptual understandings?
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