Vocabulary

Developing a large vocabulary that consists of various words is extremely important. The “Vocabulary Lessons” article discusses the importance of word knowledge. It also points out how big the gap is when it comes to vocabulary knowledge. Children growing up in homes with more educated parents tend to have a more advanced vocabulary than those who come from homes with parents who are not educated. Although there is such a gap, different strategies can be applied to help a child’s vocabulary improve and grow. The article includes four practices that can be implemented by teachers to help students develop vocabulary. One of the practices in vocabulary development is to deliver explicit, rich instruction in order to develop important vocabulary. This practice includes the STAR model of explicit vocabulary instruction, which I am really interested in. STAR stands for Select, Teach, Activate, and Revisit. I really like this model because every step allows students to become more familiar with important words.

In “The Vocabulary-Rich Classroom: Modeling Sophisticated Word Use to Promote Word Consciousness and Vocabulary Growth” article, they argue the importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension. The article states that vocabulary is a crucial factor in the development of reading skills and plays a huge part in comprehension. The article also discusses what it means to know a word and identifies the different levels of word knowledge. I think it is important for teachers to realize that there are different levels of word knowledge. As a student, there were words I had seen before, but had no clue as to what the meanings of them were. Another thing presented in the article that I agreed with and hope to implement is being a word-conscious teacher. I want to link words to familiar concepts so that students will be able to remember those words and be comfortable using them in their everyday language.

After reading the “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 million Word Gap by Age 3” article, I was shocked by the statistics they came up with in their research. The gap in vocabulary between the average child in a professional family, working-class family, and welfare family is unbelievable. This becomes a major challenge for teachers when implementing vocabulary instruction. This also makes it hard on the teachers to choose the most important vocabulary words for the whole class to learn. Teachers must think of ways to pick the most appropriate vocabulary words that meet all of the students in the class.

Chapter 6 presents many innovative ways to try and close the achievement gap and make high levels of literacy achievable in order to meet the needs of every student. I like the idea of providing a much real experience as possible in the classroom to build vocabulary. Having a “Show and Talk” will allow students to become familiar with objects that they might have at home, but never knew what the purpose of the object. Another activity mentioned in the chapter that I really liked was using “picture walks” to increase vocabulary. I think that this is a great way to start a read-aloud because it allows students to get an idea of what the book is about while helping build their vocabulary.