As we start this book, we reflect for a moment on the roles vocabulary plays in people’s lives. A rich vocabulary supports learning about the world, encountering new ideas, enjoying the beauty of language. A rich vocabulary enhances an interview, allows one to see the humor in wordplay, shores up what an individual wants to say, and, especially, wants to write. It is clear that a large and rich vocabulary is the hallmark of an educated individual. Indeed, a large vocabulary repertoire facilitates becoming an educated person to the extent that vocabulary knowledge is strongly related to reading proficiency in particular and school achievement in general.
There is much evidence—strong correlations, several causal studies, as well as rich theoretical orientations—that shows that vocabulary is tightly related to reading comprehension across the age span: in primary grades (Baker, Simmons, & Kame’enui, 1998), in the intermediate grades (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982), in high school (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997), and with adults (Smith, 1941). According to Perfetti and Adolf (2012), “ . . . for any encounter with a given test, it is the quality of the reader’s word knowledge (form as well as meaning) for the words in that text that is crucial to comprehension” (p. 14).
The practical problem is that there are profound differences in vocabulary knowledge among learners from different ability or socioeconomic (SES) groups from toddlers to adults. Consider that:
• By age 3, there is strong evidence of a gap in vocabulary knowledge for children of different SES groups (Hart & Risley, 1995).
When children enter school the gap continues:
• In kindergarten, sizable differences are found between students (of varying SES) in the number of words known (Baker et al., 1998).
• First-grade children from higher SES groups know about twice as many words as children from lower SES groups (Graves, Brunetti, & Slater, 1982; Graves & Slater, 1987).
• First-grade vocabulary predicted students’ reading achievement in their junior year in high school (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997).
• High-knowledge third graders had vocabularies about equal to lowest-performing 12th graders (Smith, 1941).
• Once established, differences in vocabulary knowledge remain (Biemiller, 2001; Hart & Risley, 1995; Juel, Biancarosa, Coker, & Deffes, 2003).
Evidence of how strongly students’ word trajectories are set early in their school careers is bad news indeed! But a hopeful spin can be put on the bad news by considering the status of vocabulary instruction in the schools. The fact that early differences in vocabulary remain through the school years is understandable if little has been done to change that situation during the school years. So perhaps it is not so much the case that those differences cannot be changed but rather that little has been done to focus on making them change.
A decade ago the available evidence indicated that there was little emphasis on the acquisition of vocabulary in school curricula (Biemiller, 2001; Scott, Jamieson, & Asselin, 1998; Watts, 1995). So, given the evidence, in the first edition of Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002), we summed up vocabulary instruction in the schools as “there isn’t much.” As to nature of the instruction, at the time of the first edition, our review of the early commercial basal readers in the early 2000s, revealed approaches to vocabulary instruction in the form of traditional dictionary definitions and short exercises, such as a cloze paragraph or matching words with definitions or synonyms. Those of us who taught inservice teachers saw that those were exactly the approaches that teachers initially took when asked to develop vocabulary lessons for class assignments.
Now, a decade later, we need to ask whether those characterizations of classroom vocabulary instruction still hold. Two sources can shed some light on the issue: first, descriptions of vocabulary instruction presented in commercial basal materials published after 2008/2009, and second, studies that describe current classroom vocabulary instruction.
As to the nature of vocabulary instruction in current basals, we have seen a little change in how several of the newer basals provide vocabulary instruction. In some basals, we saw more thoughtful selection of sets of words targeted for instruction. One basal, for sure, and at least one other basal, kind of, provided student-friendly definitions. Occasionally, we saw some follow-up activities that seemed to have a little verve. In one basal we saw a week’s words maintained across the week’s lessons and brought up in subsequent lessons, neither of which was found in earlier basals. But in other basals we did not find such features, let alone anything that suggested that vocabulary research had undergirded instruction.
Turning to the second source of information about classroom instruction, over the 10 years since Bringing Words to Life was first published, several investigators have dealt with research about what classroom vocabulary instruction is like, and each has concluded that instruction was wanting (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2006; Walsh, 2003). Blachowicz, Fisher, Ogle, and Watts-Taffe’s (2006) summary about classroom vocabulary practices documents “less-than-robust classroom practice” (p. 524).
In contrast, it was—and is—our position that the operative principle for vocabulary instruction is that it be robust: vigorous, strong, and powerful in effect. A robust approach to vocabulary involves directly explaining the meanings of words along with thought-provoking, playful, and interactive follow-up.* The findings of studies that examined robust instruction has shown it to be effective, not only for learning the meanings of words but also for affecting reading comprehension (Beck et al., 1982; McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Perfetti, 1983; McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Pople, 1985).
When Bringing Words to Life was first published, virtually all the research that was available was directed toward older students, including the studies we had conducted. Nevertheless, even with the absence of empirical research about the effects of robust instruction on young children’s knowledge of sophisticated words, it was with some confidence that we passed along the details of robust instruction to teachers in the primary grades.
Where did that confidence come from? We were able to include in the first edition of Bringing Words to Life some discussion of vocabulary instruction for young children, as we were in the midst of a set of studies involving kindergarten and first-grade children in robust vocabulary. We have now completed three studies, all of which confirmed the viability and potential for teaching young students sophisticated words. We discuss this work in Chapter 4, but to offer an appetizer of sorts—we provide some examples of kindergartners using sophisticated words in the classroom.
These examples from kindergartners, brought to us at a national meeting by an excited director of literacy, were taught the words nuisance, concentrate, reluctant, intimidated, drenched, and glanced through robust instruction. Teachers reported comments such as “He’s being a nuisance” and “I can’t concentrate.” And when several target words were posted, children wrote sentences such as “I was reluctant to ride my bike,” “I was intimidated win I went to a new school,” “I was drenched becuz I got vre wet,” and “I glanced at a car It is pnk an blu.”
Our research with implementing robust vocabulary instruction in a variety of classrooms supports our emphasis on the importance of instruction. This is in contrast to an approach to vocabulary development that focuses on learning words from context, which we address in the following sections.
THE ROLE OF CONTEXT IN THE ACQUISITION
OF VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE
The word context is prevalent in both research and practice. In the vocabulary instructional world, context can mean one of two conditions. There are instructional contexts, which are intentionally written to support figuring out an unfamiliar word’s likely meaning. The other notion of context is connected to learning new words in the course of reading naturally occurring text. From at least the beginning of the 20th century, educational researchers no less prominent than Thorndike associated learning from context via “wide reading” as the way that vocabulary was learned. The importance of wide reading to vocabulary development is supported by more current researchers (Anderson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988; Nagy & Herman, 1985) with the logical follow-up that vocabulary instruction should focus on students learning words from context. Few would disagree that wide reading is a major way people learn words, nor would they argue against the need for schools to support wide reading.
To understand the requirements and limitations of learning words from context in the course of independent reading, we consider several assumptions that underlie this view of vocabulary acquisition. First, it is the case that words are learned from context. Second, instruction must focus on learning vocabulary from context because there are just too many words to teach to get the job done through direct instruction. Closely related is the question of how and why certain words are targeted for instruction. Let us examine these issues.
Words Are Learned from Context, but . . .
It is indeed true that words are learned from context, but in the course of an individual’s development the type of context changes. Early word learning takes place through oral contexts, and oral environments play a role forever, but under most conditions they begin to play a lesser role. Most of the words children customarily encounter in oral language beyond their earliest years, both at home and in school, are words that they already know. Thus, the source of later vocabulary learning shifts to written contexts—what children read. The problem is that it is not so easy to learn word meanings from written context. Written context lacks many of the features of oral language that support learning new word meanings, such as intonation, body language, and shared physical surroundings. As such, written language is a far less effective vehicle for learning new words than oral language.
In terms of learning new words in the course of reading, research shows that it does occur, but in small increments. That is, by no means will all the unfamiliar words encountered in reading be learned, and those that are learned will require multiple encounters with them before learning is accomplished. Studies estimate that of 100 unfamiliar words met in reading, between 5 and 15 of them will be learned (Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985; Swanborn & de Glopper, 1999). However, in order for any word learning to occur from reading, two conditions need to be met. First, students must read widely enough to encounter a substantial number of unfamiliar words; that means they must read enough text to encounter lots of words and they must read text of sufficient difficulty to include words that are not already familiar. Second, students must have the skills to infer word meaning information from the contexts they read. The problem is that many students in need of vocabulary development do not engage in wide reading, especially of the kinds of books that contain unfamiliar vocabulary, and these students are less able to derive meaningful information from the context (McKeown, 1985). Thus, calculations of how many words are learned from reading overestimate what occurs for many students.
The Nature of Naturally Occurring Text
Another problematic issue about relying on contexts is that many natural contexts are not all that informative for deriving word meanings. This is because an author’s purpose is to tell a story or explain a phenomenon, not to convey the meaning of a set of words. Toward getting a handle on the kinds of contexts found in natural texts, a number of years ago we examined the story contexts for several sets of target words (i.e., words that were targeted to be learned from context) in two basal reading programs (Beck, McKeown, & McCaslin, 1983). From our examination of the contexts from which the target words were to be learned, we speculated that their effectiveness in determining word meaning would fall along a continuum. Along the continuum, we identified four kinds of categories of natural contexts. Below is a description of the four categories, including an example of each that was created to typify those found in the basal programs we examined.
At one end of our continuum are misdirective contexts, those contexts that rather than revealing the meaning of the target word, seem to direct the student to an incorrect meaning. For example:
Gregory had done all he could to complete the task. When Horace approached his cousin he could see that Gregory was exhausted. Smiling broadly, Horace said, “You know there are dire results for your attempt.”
Here the context would likely lead a reader to ascribe a positive connotation to dire. The description of Horace as “smiling broadly” might encourage one to believe that Gregory was going to receive good things. And the statement, “You know there are dire results for your attempt” does not preclude thinking that dire refers to something desirable. But such contexts do not make word meaning transparent.
Problems dealing with misdirective contexts are not confined to written contexts nor are they confined to children. Elizabeth Fasulo, a literacy coach from Montgomery County, Maryland, upon rereading Charlotte’s Web (White, 1952, p. 162) e-mailed us an “enchanting example of a misdirective context.” It’s from the following dialogue between Wilbur and Charlotte:
“It’s time I made an egg sac and filled it with eggs.”
“I didn’t know you could lay eggs,” said Wilbur in amazement.
“Oh sure,” said the spider, “I’m versatile.”
“What does versatile mean? Full of eggs?” asked Wilbur.
“Certainly not,” said Charlotte.
This example represents the problematic nature of initial encounters with words for young students (and little pigs). Thus, incorrect conclusions about word meaning are likely to be drawn. We hasten to point out that contexts such as the one above are not in themselves wrong, or a misuse of language. The words used communicate the ideas well—if one knows the meanings of the words. But such contexts do not make word meaning transparent. Thus, it is easy to draw incorrect conclusions about word meaning.
Next along the continuum of contexts are nondirective contexts, which seem to be of no assistance in directing the reader toward any particular meaning for a word. For example:
Dan heard the door open and wondered who had arrived. He couldn’t make out the voices. Then he recognized the lumbering footsteps on the stairs and knew it was Aunt Grace.
In this example, lumbering has any number of inferrable associations: light, lively, familiar, and heavy would all fit the context, but each would communicate a different meaning.
Further along the continuum we find general contexts, which seem to provide enough information for the reader to place the word in a general category. Consider this example:
Joe and Stan arrived at the party at 7 o’clock. By 9:30, the evening seemed to drag for Stan. But Joe really seemed to be having a good time at the party. “I wish I could be as gregarious as he is,” thought Stan.
In this passage, it is easy to infer that gregarious describes someone who enjoys parties. As such, the passage provides clues to the meaning, although the specific characteristics of the word remain unclear.
Finally, we reach directive contexts, which seem likely to lead the student to a specific, correct meaning for a word. For example:
When the cat pounced on the dog, he leapt up, yelping, and knocked down a shelf of books. The animals ran past Wendy, tripping her. She cried out and fell to the floor. As the noise and confusion mounted, Mother hollered upstairs, “What’s all that commotion?”
In this example, the reader is led to the meaning of commotion through clues from the description of the scene and by a definitional phrase, “noise and confusion.”
Directive contexts are similar to instructional contexts as they both provide information around the target word that supports a reader to infer the meaning. The difference is that instructional contexts do so intentionally and directive contexts are unintentional. That is, an author might use an unfamiliar word in a sentence that happened to have clues to the word’s meaning, but there was no intention to provide the clues. (Further discussion of instructional contexts appears in Chapter 7.)
To test the validity of our context categories, we selected two stories from basal programs and categorized the contexts surrounding target words according to our scheme. We then obscured the target words and presented the stories to 13 adults. We chose to use adult subjects because the target words were already part of their vocabulary repertoires and as such would provide a rigorous test for our categories.
The data clearly supported the categorization system. The adults were able to supply an average of 11 out of 13 words we categorized as having directive contexts. Correct identification dropped sharply for the general context category, and it dropped even further for the nondirective category. Only one subject could identify any word in the misdirective category.
This demonstration suggests that it is precarious to believe that naturally occurring contexts are sufficient, or even generally helpful, in providing clues to promote initial acquisition of a word’s meaning. Again, it is important to point out that textual materials are written by professional authors who are conscious of their word choices to communicate events and ideas. The stories were not developed to provide contexts to help readers figure out the meaning of words.
Given the issues discussed above, it must be acknowledged that relying on wide reading for vocabulary growth adds to the inequities in individual differences in vocabulary knowledge. Struggling readers do not read well enough to make wide reading an option. To acquire word knowledge from reading requires adequate decoding skills, the ability to recognize that a word is unknown, and the competency to extract meaningful information about the word from the context. Readers cannot be engaging with the latter two if they are struggling with decoding. Thus, depending on wide reading as a source of vocabulary growth leaves those children and young people who are most in need of enhancing their vocabulary repertoires with a very serious deficit. In summary, written context is clearly an important source of new vocabulary for any reader. But relying on learning word meanings from independent reading is not an adequate way to deal with students’ vocabulary development.
There Are Too Many Words to Teach, but . . .
The major argument for emphasizing learning from context comes from those who have examined the number of words that students will encounter during their school years and pronounced the task of directly teaching vocabulary simply too large. The logic that follows is that there is virtually no choice but to emphasize learning from context. A key point, however, is that many words in the language do not call for attention. It is this situation that makes direct instruction in word meanings feasible, for if most words in the language required instruction equally, clearly there would be too many words to cover in school. This notion of differential attention to words influenced our construct of words in tiers.
The Three-Tiers Framework
To get a perspective on the kinds of words that need instructional attention, consider a mature literate individual’s vocabulary as comprising three tiers (Beck, McKeown, & Omanson, 1987). The first tier consists of the most basic words: warm, dog, tired, run, talk, party, swim, look, and so on. These are the words that typically appear in oral conversations, and so children are exposed to them at high frequency from a very early age. This high exposure means that children become familiar with this set of words pretty readily, and so these Tier One words rarely require instructional attention to their meanings in school. Moving to the third tier—this set of words has a frequency of use that is quite low and often limited to specific topics and domains. Some examples of Tier Three words might be filibuster, pantheon, and epidermis. In general, a rich understanding of these words would not be of high utility for most learners. These words are probably best learned when a specific need arises, such as introducing filibuster during a unit about the U.S. Congress. The content words of science and social studies reside in this tier.
The second tier contains words that are of high utility for mature language users and are found across a variety of domains. Examples include contradict, circumstances, precede, auspicious, fervent, and retrospect. These words are characteristic of written text and are found only infrequently in conversation, which means that students are less likely to learn these words independently, compared with Tier One words. Because of the large role Tier Two words play in a language user’s repertoire, rich knowledge of words in the second tier can have a powerful impact on verbal functioning. Thus, instruction directed toward Tier Two words can be most productive.
How large is the task of teaching Tier Two words? We can get a handle on the size of the effort by extrapolating from Nagy and Anderson’s (1984) analysis of words in printed school English for third through ninth grade. Nagy and Anderson estimate that:
• Good readers in this age range read approximately one million words of text per year.
• There are 88,500 words (actually word families—groups of related words such as introduce, introduction, reintroduce, and introducing) in printed school English, and half of these are so rare that even avid readers may encounter them only once in their lifetime of reading.
• There are about 15,000 word families that would be encountered at least once every 10 years.
Using these figures, it seems reasonable to consider these 15,000 word families as comprising Tiers One and Two. Interestingly, Nation (2001) has posed a similar number as a reasonable vocabulary, saying that “To read with minimal disturbance from unknown vocabulary, language users probably need a vocabulary of 15,000 to 20,000 words” (p. 20). These 15,000 word families represent words that occur once or more in 10 million running words of text. Our best estimate of Tier One, the most familiar words that need little or no instruction, is 8,000 word families. We base this number on Nagy and Anderson’s statement that a typical third grader likely knows about 8,000 words. That leaves about 7,000 word families for Tier Two.
Seven thousand words may still seem like quite a large number for instruction to undertake over the course of, say, kindergarten through ninth grade. That would amount to an average of 700 words per year. So, would a reasonable goal be to teach them all? Or teach half of them? There is no way to answer that question with certainty. But we assert that attention to a substantial portion of those words, say, an average of 400 per year, would make a significant contribution to an individual’s verbal functioning. Aiming for this number of words would allow the depth of instruction needed to affect students’ text comprehension ability. We believe this to be the case because about 400 words per year conforms to the rate at which we taught words in some of our previous research, which resulted in improvements in word knowledge and in comprehension of texts containing the instructed words (Beck et al., 1982).
KNOWING A WORD IS NOT
AN ALL-OR-NOTHING PROPOSITION
It is not the case that one either knows or does not know a word. In fact, word knowledge is a rather complex concept. We focus on two of the issues involved in word knowledge. The first is that the extent of knowledge one may have about individual words can range from a little to a lot, and the second is that there are qualitatively different kinds of knowledge about words.
That there are differences in extent and kind of word knowledge is not a new idea. Almost 50 years ago, Dale (1965) offered a description of the extent of word knowledge in terms of four stages. More recently, Beck and colleagues (1987) suggested that an individual’s knowledge about a word can be described as falling along a continuum. As the table below indicates, there are several differences between the two classification schemes, but there are more similarities.
| Dale (1965) | Beck, McKeown, & Omanson (1987) |
| Stage 1: Never saw it before. | No knowledge |
| Stage 2: Heard it, but don’t know what it means. | General sense; for example, mendacious has a negative connotation |
| Stage 3: Recognizes it in context as having something to do with ___________. |
Narrow, context-bound knowledge |
| Has knowledge of a word but not able to recall it readily enough to use in appropriate situation | |
| Stage 4: Knows it well. | Rich, decontextualized knowledge of a word’s meaning, its relationship to other words, and its extension to metaphorical uses |
On the first row, both classification schemes start exactly the same by noting the absence of knowledge. One difference is in the second row. Dale (1965) describes an individual who is aware that a particular word exists but does not know what it means, such as a young child who knows that there is a word liberty—presumably from the pledge of allegiance—but doesn’t know what it means. In contrast, Beck and colleagues’ (1987) second row describes an individual who knows that liberty is a good thing, but not what it means. Both descriptions on the third row are illustrations of needing a context to recall a word. On the fourth row, Beck and colleagues include what might be called fluency or facility, whereas Dale does not attend to that feature. And on the last row, Dale simply states that the most advanced stage of word knowledge is “knows it well,” while Beck and colleagues include examples of what the most advanced kind of knowledge involves, such as understanding what someone is doing when he or she is devouring a book. The details of the classifications are not nearly as important as the overall concept—word knowledge is not an all-or-nothing proposition.
Other researchers offer additional dimensions of word knowledge. Kame’enui, Dixon, and Carnine (1987) add an interesting facet that they labeled “derived knowledge.” That is, an individual may derive enough information about a word to understand it in the context being read or heard, but then not remember the information, and thus does not “learn” the word.
Miller’s (1978) description of dimensions of word knowledge includes the important consideration of the relationship of a word to other concepts, such as topics to which the word can apply and the kinds of discourse in which the word is typically found. The importance of the relationship to other words is illustrated well in two examples described by Nagy and Scott (2000): “How well a person knows the meaning of whale depends in part on their understanding of mammal. A person who already knows the words hot, cold, and cool has already acquired some of the components of the word warm, even if the word warm has not yet been encountered” (p. 272; original emphasis).
Further dimensions of word knowledge include its register, that is, whether a word is used in formal or less formal contexts, its grammatical form, and its affective connotations (Nagy & Scott, 2000). And, as if all of the above were not complicated enough, Nagy and Scott (2000) point out that different facets of word knowledge are relatively independent. Thus, a learner might know the definition of a word but be unable to produce a context for it, or be able to use it in seemingly appropriate ways but actually have a misunderstanding of its meaning.
Perfetti (2007), in his recent model of word knowledge, the lexical quality hypothesis (LQH), discusses word knowledge by specifying the word features that characterize high-quality entries in a reader’s mental dictionary, or lexicon. Just as is the case of an entry in a dictionary, several features of a word are available in a high-quality mental representation. One of course is its meaning, or semantic representation, for example, knowing that a serendipitous event is a good thing that happens accidentally. Another feature is its pronunciation (ser-uhn-dip-i-tous), or phonological representation. An additional feature is its spelling, or orthographic representation. Linking the spelling of a word to its pronunciation is what happens during reading.
Other important attributes of a word relate to its morphology and syntax. The word serendipitous has recognizable morphemes, or units of meaning, including the suffix -ous, which means “full of” or “having.” A serendipitous event has or is full of good fortune. The word serendipitous also has a specific syntax, or role in a sentence, and that function is related to its form. For example, serendipitous is the adjective form of the word serendipity, which is a noun. According to Perfetti (2007), it is the interconnectedness of semantics, phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax that constitute a high-quality representation.
When a learner acquires information about a word’s meaning, connections form in the brain to other words and to experiences that are related to what has been learned (Perfetti, 2007; Reichle & Perfetti, 2003; Wolf, 2007). So if you were to think about the word dance . . . what comes to mind? . . . probably not “rhythmic body movements to music” but more likely you will think about dances you have gone to; kinds of dances—modern, waltz, hip hop; ballet lessons you took as a child; and so on. All the contexts in which you have encountered the word dance or experienced such an event lead to the building of an abstract representation of the word’s meaning.
The abstract nature of the representation means that when you read the word in a new context, you are not dependent on specific information from a particular context that you have met before, which could limit your understanding of that new context. Rather, the representation you have created has many associated concepts and can bring the most relevant ones to the surface to help make the new context meaningful. Representations of word meaning, if they are of high quality, are flexible and allow rapid retrieval of meaning when we meet the word in text (Perfetti, 2007).
Based on the notion that rich word knowledge is built through multiple encounters with words, the LQH holds that what seems like a deficit in ability for less able comprehenders is more likely the result of knowledge differences—knowledge that has not been acquired or not practiced to a high enough level. When we consider what that means for instruction, this is good news, as it implies that we can help students to become good comprehenders by providing the experiences to build the knowledge they are lacking and support their practice of it.
What it means to know a word is clearly a complicated, multifaceted matter, and one that has serious implications for how words are taught. Most importantly, how do you decide what kind and how much instruction is adequate for students to learn words? That depends on what kind of learning is desired. We think that most often the goals that teachers have are like those specified in the fourth and fifth rows in Dale’s (1965) and Beck and colleagues’ (1987) classification schemes, shown earlier—that is, for the students to be able to use the instructed words in comprehension of text containing those words and to recall the words well enough to use them in writing. That calls for a deep kind of knowledge, which requires robust instruction. We consider robust instruction in the section that follows.
MAKING WORDS COME TO LIFE
THROUGH ROBUST INSTRUCTION
People who have large vocabularies tend to be intrigued with words. As such, a major impetus for writing this book is our concern that school vocabulary instruction tends to be dull, rather than of the sort that might instigate student’s interest and awareness of words. Becoming interested and aware of words is not a likely outcome of the way instruction is typically handled, which is to have students look up definitions in a dictionary or glossary (Scott et al., 2003; Watts, 1995). Indeed, asking students to look up words in the dictionary and use them in a sentence is a stereotypic example of what students find uninteresting in school.
Less than interesting instruction is not a concern of merely wanting students to enjoy classroom activities. Rather, students need to develop an interest in and awareness of words in order to adequately build their vocabulary repertoires. Among what needs to occur is that students keep using new words so they come to “own” the words. Students need to notice words in their environments whose meanings they do not know. They need to become aware of and explore relationships among words in order to refine and fully develop word meanings. Indeed, being curious about the meaning of an unknown word that one encounters and intrigued by how it relates to other words is a hallmark of those who develop large vocabularies.
Development of these facets of word knowledge must be the direct focus of instructional conditions. It has been our experience that students become interested and enthusiastic about words when instruction is rich and lively. We developed a variety of instructional activities for use in all the grade levels in which we worked. As we developed these activities we attempted to articulate what a particular activity did for students and we kept in mind that the materials needed to have some verve. There will be many, many examples of these throughout this book and in the Appendix. Here we provide some general ideas of several of the kind of activities that comprise what we call robust vocabulary instruction. We start out with some enhancements we made to traditional activities—matching and writing sentences in which new words are incorporated.
We included tasks that required students to quickly match a known word with a new word. For example, to elicit accomplice, the teacher presents the clue word thief and students respond with accomplice. Here the intent was that students expand their mental networks of related words, which in the case of accomplice likely includes thief, bank, police, robber. The teacher might offer scoundrel, bandit, illegal—all toward the principle that the greater the amount of semantic connections in a person’s network, the more rich and flexible their understanding of words.
Matching exercises have probably been used for decades. What is important is that teachers and developers know the purpose of a given matching exercise. If the exercise were matching new words with definitions, it presumably enhances word/definition associations, not known/new word associations.
Another mainstay of traditional instruction is asking students to write a sentence that incorporates a target word. Before students face a blank sheet of paper and the direction to write sentences that makes sense for, say, five new words, we put sentence stems on the paper and ask students to complete them. For example, the stem, “The accomplice swore he would never break the law again because ___________” is presented. The value of stems is that they provide a direction that scaffold students’ thinking. In contrast, in traditional vocabulary instruction asking students to write sentences with target words usually occurs right after the only instruction received was a definition. The inadequacies of the results are well known—for example, “I saw a philanthropist.”
When a set of words allowed it, we attempted to tap affective associations. For example, when the teacher said “philanthropist,” students were to say “yay” or “boo” depending on how they felt about someone who could be called a philanthropist. The value of this is that if everything else fails, we assert that the learner would keep the idea that a philanthropist and virtuoso were positive, and miser and accomplice had negative connotations, as described on both the Dale (1965) and Beck and colleagues (1987) classification schemes. Knowing a domain in which a word fits can be useful. When encountering virtuoso, the reader likely has a memory trace and when the word appears in subsequent text another facet might be added. That sequence was actually the way one of us remembers learning the full meaning of bucolic. When encountering bucolic, she processed it as quiet peaceful, and that was sufficient to understand what was being said. That bucolic also has rural and pastorial features was not processed until she was reading a travel book.
We have developed game-like tasks that had to be completed under timed conditions, and tasks that took advantage of semantic or affective relationships between the target words and previously acquired vocabulary. There were several variations of how two words might be related. For example, how could gregarious and hermit go together? “A hermit doesn’t want to be with people; someone who is gregarious wants to be with people.” Another relationship task was one in which 12 previously learned words were displayed on cards and students were asked to sort them into piles of words that could go together. The rules were that a pile had to have at least two words, and the student had to tell how the words went together. Asking students why they responded the ways they did is very characteristic of robust instruction. In the sorting activity, one student perplexed us with his choice of eavesdrop and gregarious. When asked why they went together, he responded, “If someone reports you to the teacher for talking to a friend, they are eavesdropping, and you’re being gregarious.” This kind of ability to make an unusual but very fitting relationship illustrates the depth of understanding that had developed from the kind of instruction he had experienced.
We also took advantage of popular games, in particular, Jeopardy. The teacher said “virtuoso” and a student would need to respond with something like, “What is someone who plays the violin exceptionally well called?” The teacher said “boisterous” and a student responded, “What could you call a class of students talking loudly and shouting across the room?”
Extension of word use beyond the classroom was one of the important aspects of our vocabulary research, so we arranged conditions that encouraged students to notice words in environments beyond school. Toward that end we included a motivational device to increase the chances that this would occur. The device we used in our vocabulary studies was Word Wizard. Students could earn points toward becoming a word wizard by reporting the circumstances of having seen, heard, or used target words outside of class. Points were tallied every few weeks, and students received certificates based on their totals. (Further discussion of Word Wizard is found in Chapter 6.)
We relished the many anecdotes that Word Wizard provided. A long-time favorite was a boy who quietly told his teacher that he had heard a word on TV, but that it was a bad word. (Note: The week’s words included frank—to be honest.) The teacher told him, that if he wanted to, he could whisper what he had heard to her. With the boy’s lips close to the teacher’s ear, the boy said, “I heard a man on TV say ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’”
Since using the Word Wizard in our studies and describing it to teachers, we have seen teachers develop a host of variations that are useful for similar purposes and across various grade levels. In one teacher’s classroom, the Word Wizard device she created allowed first-grade children to “show off” their new vocabulary expertise. At any time that a child could explain the meaning of three of the words under the display, he or she received each of those words on cards, as well as a Word Wizard hat. Then, with the Word Wizard hat and the three cards, the child could go through the school and any adult could read the word on one of the cards and ask the child to explain its meaning. The other teachers, and in particular the principal, got into it, and there were many oohs and aahs heard when a Word Wizard was in the hall!
Older students could earn extra credit by finding words and uses for words outside of class or a free pass for a night’s homework or a quiz and the like. The discovery of examples of target words in various environments can be left up to the students’ motivation, as in the case of doing so for extra credit and, indeed, for Word Wizard points. However, looking for examples of words in various environments can be primed somewhat. For example, the teacher can assign a word or several words for students to find or to invent an example or application for. The teacher might ask students to find the words reasonable, inexpensive, or competitive in newspaper or TV advertisements.
Over the years as robust vocabulary was implemented, we virtually always received reports from teachers about what a difference it made in students’ interest in vocabulary. And from different places in the country we heard about similar responses. During school assemblies, a rumble would go through the place in the auditorium where the class in which we had implemented our vocabulary approach was sitting when a speaker mentioned one of the words they had learned—for instance, when a newspaper reporter was introduced as a journalist, when the principal asked particular students to stand to be commended for some accomplishment, in a safety discussion when the crossing guard told the students they shouldn’t be meandering across the street. The rumble of recognition had an unintended consequence when a substitute librarian made a fourth-grade class go back to their homeroom because the whole class had misbehaved. It seems that when the librarian had mentioned the publisher, Harcourt Brace, the students had misheard it as “embrace,” and shouted “embrace, embrace that’s a word, that’s a word.” One might wonder whether prior to the incident there had been any other student acting up!
After the publication of the first edition of Bringing Words to Life, we turned our attention to developing systematic instruction for children in the primary grades and engaging in empirical work with the young children. We drew on our earlier experiences with vocabulary instruction for students in the intermediate grades to develop instruction for children in the earliest grades. The teachers who implemented the materials reported the children’s excitement with vocabulary. And we saw it again for ourselves in our new work. A favorite anecdote is about the first grader who reported to his teacher, “I told my mother that I was going to act more mature, and she took me to Toys R Us.”
SUMMARY
In this chapter, we emphasized the disparity in vocabulary knowledge for children from diverse SES groups, which is among the reasons we call for starting vocabulary instruction in kindergarten. A three-tiers framework was presented that classifies words as those that are learned in everyday common language (Tier One), those that are more prevalent in written language (Tier Two), and those that are tightly associated with a content area (Tier Three). Two classifications of what it means to know a word showed that knowing a word is not an all-or-nothing proposition.
We explained difficulty of deriving meanings from unfamiliar words in naturally occurring contexts. And, we presented a continuum of four kinds of contexts from misdirective to directive as a means of highlighting some of the textual situations that occur in naturally occurring contexts that can make it difficult or not so difficult to derive meaning. Several examples in the chapter described young children taught using a Tier Two word and enjoying it. A key notion in the chapter is that robust instruction is needed in order to mediate comprehending and composing.
YOUR TURN
1. Completing the accompanying chart should provide some evidence for the notion that word knowledge is indeed multifaceted. Put a check under the appropriate category to show your knowledge of each word.
| Word | Know it well, can explain it, use it | Know something about it, can relate it to a situation | Have seen or heard the word | Do not know the word |
| palpable | ||||
| admonish | ||||
| sagacious | ||||
| ameliorate | ||||
| pneumonia | ||||
| heredity |
2. Choose an excerpt from a magazine article, newspaper, or novel. Select 10 target words and categorize them as having one of the following contexts: misdirective, nondirective, general, or directive. Make a reproduce of the excerpt and block out the 10 target words. Ask a few adults to try to figure out what the missing words are. Words in what kinds of contexts were most difficult for readers to figure out? Which were easiest? Do your results agree with ours?
3. Sort the following words into which of the three tiers each belongs: child, forlorn, exquisite, oboe, birthday, stethoscope, break, colonial, cherish, repeal.
*We initially called our vocabulary instruction “rich”; we changed the label to “robust” with the publication in 2002 of the first edition of Bringing Words to Life. In articles and chapters published before 2002, the original works use the “rich” label. However, in this book we will use the newer label “robust” throughout, since it is the more recent label. No matter the label, the kind of instruction is the same.