Frequently Asked Questions and Responses about Vocabulary Instruction

Cindy Riedl
Aug 31, 2009

1. Why is it important to teach vocabulary?
• When vocabulary instruction is integrated into the content, a student's depth of understanding increases.
• Students struggling with understanding vocabulary and concepts produce misunderstandings that interfere with comprehending the content of the curriculum.

2. Why should you fit vocabulary strategies into an already full curriculum?
• The pay off for taking the time to explicitly teach key vocabulary is well spent when students demonstrate a greater understanding of the content, which is reflected by an increase in their test scores, class participation and self confidence.

3. What is previewing and who should do it?
• Students with limited prior knowledge about a topic or concept benefit from discussing and practicing key vocabulary before instruction.
• Previewing the meaning of words and building prior knowledge about the topic prior to instruction or reading a passage reduces the cognitive load and allows accurate connections to be made to new content.
• Previewing can be accomplished 2 to 3 days before classroom instruction with at-risk students by reading specialists, resource teachers, classroom teachers during Flex Groups, or ELL teachers, but it is accomplished for all students in the classroom during the Activating Strategy using a variety of vocabulary strategies.

4. What does research say about vocabulary instruction?
• Time is wasted when students are instructed to memorize words that will be tested at the end of the week.  This produces short-term memory retention with minimal application or connections.
• Having students discover new word meaning using context is less effective than once thought.
• Teaching vocabulary in context linked to new learning can raise test scores 33 percentile points. (US DOE 2002).
• To understand written or spoken words, students must know about 95% of the words.
• The relationship between word knowledge and comprehension is unequivocal.

5. How can teachers identify key vocabulary in a trade book?
• Chapter by chapter record words that will be challenging to the readers in the book, on paper, in a list.
• Make a check next to the word for each additional occurrence of the word.
• When done, you will know the total number of challenging words in the book and the number of times each word appears.
• Use this information to prioritize which vocabulary should be previewed before students read the passage or chapter.
• Another way to identify word frequency is to use a computer database program.

6. If teachers could only do three things to teach vocabulary, what would they be?
• Give the definition, description and the contextual information about word meaning to students.
• Involve students actively in word learning, i.e. writing the meaning in their own words, visualize and create memory enhancing connections using symbols or pictures.
• Provide multiple opportunities for using the word in a variety of contexts.

7. What should high school teachers do about SAT words?
• Google SAT games.  Have students use interactive web sites!
• Use the SAT words in your classroom discussions and encourage students to do the same.  Expose students to high quality oral language in the classroom. Make it a challenge!
• Promote word consciousness. When a word from the SAT word lists is discovered in literature or during content reading, take the time to explain the meaning, how you might use it as high quality oral language and then have them personalize it by using it themselves with a partner.

8. Why not teach all unknown words in a text?
• Too many for direct instruction.
• Direct instruction takes a lot of class time.
• Students may be able to understand a text without knowing every word.
• Students need opportunities to use word-learning strategies to independently get the meaning of new words.

Learn more about Vocabulary Instruction by clicking here.