Deciding Which Vocabulary Words to Teach and How to Teach Them

 

            In this article in The Reading Teacher, Michael Graves (University of Minnesota/ Minneapolis) and seven colleagues ask how educators should decide which vocabulary words to teach from a text. Making good decisions is even more important given the Common Core’s emphasis on vocabulary.

Based on a three-year research project, the authors created the SWIT process – Selecting Words for Instruction from Texts. It involves choosing and teaching four types of unfamiliar words:

-    Essential words – These are important for understanding the text.

-    Valuable words – These have broad, enduring utility for students’ reading and writing – for example, for sixth graders, discord and inevitable.

-    Accessible words – These are more common, higher frequency words that are not likely to be understood by students with limited vocabulary knowledge – for example, consider and recent.

-    Imported words – These aren’t in the actual text but will enhance a reader’s understanding, appreciation, or learning – for example prejudice, gullible, democracy, environmentalism.

How many words should students learn? The authors recommend teaching 20 words a week and trying to teach 500-600 by the end of each school year. Here are their suggestions:

For a narrative text: (Island of the Blue Dolphins for 4^th graders):

-    Identify potentially Unfamiliar words. Then create a chart with all those words in the left-hand column (in the example given, there are 22: advice, ancestors, befall, calm, crawfish, faint, fiber, fortune, headland, kelp, leagues, lessened, omen, pause, pitch, planks, pursued, sandspit, seeping, serpent, skirted, and spouting)

-    Label six more columns, three for type of word (Essential, Valuable, and Accessible) and three for type of instruction (Powerful Instruction, Brief Explanation, and Infer Meaning), and leave room at the bottom for Imported Words.

-    Make a check-mark for each Unfamiliar word in the appropriate column: Essential, Valuable, or Accessible – for example, advice and ancestors are Essential, befall and calm are Valuable, pause and spouting are Accessible.

-    Decide if there are Imported words that need to be added – in this text, determination was deemed an important addition to the lesson.

-    Determine the optimal type of instruction for each word – for example, the teacher decides omen is best taught by Powerful Instruction, calm through a Brief Explanation, and faint through Infer Meaning.

-    Implement vocabulary instruction. For example, for Powerful Instruction of the word determination, the teacher gives a clear definition, discusses the context sentences, asks questions that require deep thinking, and provides a vocabulary reference sheet.

The procedure for an informational text is similar.

            The authors acknowledge that the SWIT process is time-consuming, but they argue that

it’s time well spent and after it’s been done once, the chart and teaching strategies are money in the bank for future years and other teachers.

 

“Words, Words Everywhere, But Which Ones Do We Teach?” by Michael Graves, James Baumann, Camille Blachowicz, Patrick Manyak, Ann Bates, Char Cieply, Jeni Davis, and Heather Von Gunten in The Reading Teacher, February 2014 (Vol. 67, #5, p. 333-346),

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trtr.1228/abstract; Graves can be reached at mgraves@umn.edu.