The Word Discovery Process What Strong Readers Do with New Words When people with good reading skills encounter new words in text, they generally follow the same process for figuring out what those words mean. (This assumes, of course, that they do not skip over the words.) They follow a process of decoding and discovery….
Keep Reading
What to Teach with Vocabulary Vocabulary contributes to several other reading components, such as oral language, phonics, fluency, and comprehension. It goes both ways. If you are focusing on helping students develop their vocabulary, provide instructional activities in oral language, phonics, and comprehension that use the new words. Oral language: Words can be used in…
Keep Reading
What Does Not Work for Vocabulary Instruction As long as you are engaging students in recognizing words, analyzing word parts, reading and using new words, nearly all instructional activities will increase students’ vocabulary. However, a few types of strategies are not effective, or are minimally effective. Strategy Reason Why It Does Not Work Single or…
Keep Reading
What Works for Vocabulary Instruction The principles for vocabulary instruction give you the big ideas to consider when designing instructional activities. They reflect how people learn new words, from birth onward. These big ideas suggest that seven instructional strategies will be beneficial. The seven strategies below are approaches for putting the principles into practice. The…
Keep Reading
Principles for Vocabulary Instruction Students need to know a lot of words to become strong readers. Also, as described above, students need to know what to do when they encounter new words while reading. The principles for vocabulary instruction, if applied to your instruction, will help students with both needs. If you will think for…
Keep Reading
The 7 sub-skills of Vocabulary Now that we have applied the definition of “vocabulary” to reading instruction, we have a good idea about the various sub-skills of vocabulary development and use. The eight sub-skills are as follow. Sub-skill description Word application using words appropriately according to their meaning and context (See the chapter on Oral…
Keep Reading
What is Vocabulary for Reading? Students cannot understand texts if they do not understand the words. The same is true when they are listening to people speak. On the flip side, they have to know the meanings of words to express their own ideas. When we talk about vocabulary, we ask “How many words does…
Keep Reading