Vocabulary Begins With:
Conversation
Books
Children’s books contain almost twice as many infrequently used or rare words than college graduates use in conversation. (Hayes and Ahrens’ 1988)
Using images and connections to already known information
Rewarding finding and asking about unknown words.
Vocabulary continues with being purposeful about encountering, understanding and using words.
Four encounters with a word did not reliably improve reading comprehension; Twelve encounters did reliably improve reading comprehension. (McKeown, Beck, Omanson and Pople, 1985)
Fifth grade students who read for 10 minutes a day read 622,000 more words each year than students who did not read independently . (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1998)
Schemata and Understanding
- In order to be useful, vocabulary needs not only to be learned, but also internalized and understood fully.
- Each particular word needs to be taught in a rich enough way for the word to be generalized beyond the content of the story from which it came