Personal Inquiry and Vocabulary

Incidental or Intentional? Shouldn’t all learning and educational practices be intentional? There should be a mix of both, especially when it comes to vocabulary learning. Think about all of the words you know… and the ones that you don’t! We come across words almost daily that we have to decipher using context clues in the moment while we are reading. Many of our young learners of low socio-economic-status come to us with limited background knowledge and exposure to rich conversations, and are therefore at a loss when compared with more affluent families and children. We have to bridge this gap with a mixture of resources and repeated exposure to new words.  Incidental Vocabulary and Disciplinary Literacy As my previous post was centered around Disciplinary Literacy, I would now like to draw in incidental vocabulary learning to the discussion. In order to expose students to disciplinary vocabulary one author states that we should, “Select texts that bring new vocabulary words into...

Disciplinary Literacy and Vocabulary https://www.theliteracybug.com/developing-vocabulary Defining Disciplinary Literacy - Disciplinary Literacy includes specific skills and strategies used to comprehend subject area text, such as Science, Social Studies, Math, and even English Language Arts. There are specific skills vocabulary needs required to become successful at deciphering these texts.  The infographic at the beginning of this post lists Tier 1, 2, and 3 level words as an important part of vocabulary learning. What do each of these levels include? Tier 1 includes basic words used in many contexts and in the spoken English language.  Tier 2 words have multiple meanings and appear often in a variety of texts. Tier 3 words are subject or disciplinary related. Educators of early elementary and primary aged students should consider Tier two words when planning for, and teaching vocabulary skills. By expanding background knowledge of these multiple meaning words, students wil...

Why vocabulary? Why should researchers invest time and effort into learning what dictates best practices for this concept? Well, because vocabulary matters! It matters to students when they need to comprehend what they read. Researchers have found that vocabulary knowledge is closely tied to reading comprehension (Sparapani, et. al 2018) It matters to students that come from homes of poverty. It matters to students who are trying to learn more about what interests them. And yes, it matters when these same students take standardized tests at the end of the school year because they are being assessed over those skills.  In this post, you will find answers to four questions regarding research behind learning vocabulary and its relation to students.  What is the importance of vocabulary knowledge for students? We need to think about the difference among vocabulary dimensions. Vocabulary Breadth and depth both contribute to student comprehension of text (Sparapani et. al, 2018). ht...