Reading Practice Intensive - Session Six

 Session Six - Vocabulary

A robust vocabulary improves ALL areas of communication - listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

In our school community we need to be very interested in how we accelerate our learners because for a lot of our students they begin school with a huge deficit in terms of vocabulary, and language. Our kids listen to, and speak a far fewer words than the students from higher decile schools. 

We need to strengthen our use of word learning strategies to help our students build the lexicon needed to communicate their ideas in effective ways. 

Vocabulary knowledge accounts for 80% of the variance in reading comprehension, and is the strongest predictor of reading comprehension. Vocabulary is classically the way that we determine text difficulty.

One of the most overused, one dimensional ways of teaching words is to as students find definitions of words - so how do we move away from this?

Helping students to build consciousness about the words that they use, and how the words they use are critical to creating specific and precise meaning that can help them to express their ideas more effectively. One of the ways we can do this is drawing attention to the words that we read by expressing interest and value in those words; this helps students to collect these words, so that they are able to use them in their responses, or in their writing.

Word Consciousness is a critical part of learning and using new vocabulary, so how do we add it into our current practices of Robust Vocabulary teaching

Developing the use of Tier 2 words is critical for our students; remembering that we are trying to accelerate students in our school we need to identify specific areas of focus. Robust, interactive activities can be planned for; immediate transfer (response to text), delayed transfer (follow up) and Far transfer (maintaining, reviewing etc.)

Clarifying Meaning - How can we do it?

The ability to independently clarify texts is another skill that differentiates a struggling reader, from a proficient one.  One of my favourite strategies to focus on with students is Reciprocal Reading as it incorporates a variety of different comprehension strategies into an oral discussion (predicting, clarifying, questioning  and summarising)

Let’s look at Questioning - Reading is an active process, and is not something that good readers do passively. Instead they ask questions while reading the text; what does this mean? Why have they used this word? What’s the difference between…? Why has the author said it this way?

This is an involved process for the students, and is something that they can gloss over if they are not well practised in this. For this reason it is important to scaffold this using different strategies (question cards, comprehension dice, reading buddy bookmarks), and to make sure that they take the time within the reading activity to stop, think, question, and process.

Morphology - the smallest unit of meaning.

The teaching of morphology is something that I have not looked at since I began my English degree - I had largely taken for granted a lot of the learning that I must have done early on in my own reading journey, in regards to how words are built, and how the different parts of the word help us to make meaning - these things I just took for granted until I came to teaching.

Part of my goal for the next 2 terms will be to more explicitly teach morphology, to help students understand how the different parts of the word make meaning, and that if we do not know a word, that this is a great place to begin with, particularly with my level of readers, who are moving into more and more complex texts with more use of jargon and subject specific vocabulary than ever before.

The Syntax Project has lessons and activities that I would love to incorporate into my own teaching practice - often what is done is we will work on breaking a word down together, either in group reading, or in shared reading, however it is something that I am yet to incorporate into my own lessons explicitly.

In summary, I am excited to apply this new learning to my classes; we are pushing to take on more, and more challenging texts, that may have confident readers second guessing themselves when they encounter lower frequency, and subject specific words which they have not familiarised themselves with. It is important that I don not take for granted their confidence as readers, and that respetition of strategies that they may have done in their younger years is not wasted because they can be updated, upgraded, and made to be more engaging for them if we look outside the traditional confines of vocabulary building through definition finding, and using the word in a sentence. These types of activities can be dull, and while they can be done independently, do not always translate to the students being able to use them on their own.