Vocabulary

What is Vocabulary?

Vocabulary is the knowledge of words and word meaning in both oral print language and in productive and receptive ways.  We use vocabulary to refer to the kind of words that students must know to read increasingly demanding text and comprehension.  (McKeown and Beck)

Six Main Areas of Vocabulary Instruction

1. Robust Vocabulary Selection"Trade books are superb sources of vocabulary selection. A word was considered a good candidate if it seemed likely to be unfamiliar to young children but was a concept they could identify with and use in normal conversation." (Beck & McKeown, 2001, p. 181)
2. Explicit Instruction"When the teacher focused students' attention on the meanings of specific words, the students were more likely to learn and retain the word meanings than when the teacher focused students' attention on deriving those same word meanings from sentence context." (Jenkins, Matlock, & Slocum, 1989, p. 228)
3. Oral Instruction and Personalization"Design questions that encourage children to talk about and connect ideas and develop follow-up questions that scaffold, building meaning from those ideas." (Beck & McKeown, 2001, p.19)
4. Multiple Contexts"Students should be given opportunities to manipulate the words in a wide variety of ways, such as creating original contexts for the words, participating in games that require quick associations between words and meanings, and exploring different nuances of a word's meaning through discussion." (Beck, McKeown, & McCaslin, 1983, p. 181)
5. Rich Literature"Texts that are effective for developing language and comprehension ability need to be conceptually challenging enough to require grappling with ideas and taking an active stance toward constructing meaning." (Beck & McKeown, 2001, p.10)
6. Ample PracticeMore practice yielded significantly larger increments of learning. On three of the four measures of vocabulary knowledge, the high practice group demonstrated significantly more learning than the medium group, and on all four medium practice group achieved higher scores than the low group." (Jenkins, Matlock, & Slocum, 1989, p.228)

I love using this activity in my class when building vocabulary.

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Intractive Read Alouds are excellent ways to build a child's vocabulary!

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During the Interactive Read Alouds, you should choose a few words to add to the class' word wall.

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It is a good idea for students to keep a personal word wall as well.

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Here are some good ideas to pass along to parents to help improve their child's vocabulary.

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To Celebrate Vocabulary in our school we have a vocabulary parade.  Students choose a vocabulary word and dress up like that word for the day.