Instructional Challenges and Effective Methods: Teaching Vocabulary and Academic Language

1. Instructional Challenges and Effective Methods: Teaching Vocabulary and Academic Language Seminar 4 March 3, 2008 Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez Gutman 303

2. Seminar 1: Educating L2 Learners in the U.S. Seminar 2: Pedagogical Models Seminar 6: Disability vs. Exposure Seminar 3: Reading Words & Comprehending Text Seminar 5: Spelling, Grammar, & Writing Seminar 4: Vocabulary & Academic Language

3. Simple View of Reading (SVR) (Gough & Tunmer, 1986)

4. Vocabulary Development • Relation to reading • Early reading (lexical restructuring) • Later reading (reading comprehension) • Large social class differences • Related to density of word exposure • Related to quality of word exposure • Related transactionally to literacy experience

5. The Importance of Vocabulary for Very Young Children • Vocabulary skills during preschool  later reading skills • On average, vocabulary delays for children from low-income and language minority homes by age 3 ( but lots of variation in vocabulary among children in these populations) • Cannot assume vocabulary skills in one language reflect those in the other so it is important to monitor development in both languages over time (e.g., Pearson, 2002) • For bilingual children, parent reports alone and reports on only one of child’s languages (Oller & Eilers, 2002) may be insufficient • Teachers may observe children using words not used at home, especially in English

6. Total Conceptual Vocabulary (TCV) • Sum of Spanish and English vocabulary checklist scores minus equivalent vocabulary items • Provides single credit for words known in both Spanish and English (e.g., mesa and table counted as one concept) and additional credit for words known in Spanish or English • Important for evaluating “conceptual knowledge” Sample Student Scores

7. Mancilla-Martinez, Pan, & Vagh (under review) RQ3: How do scores on measures of young Spanish speakers’ vocabulary in English and in Spanish (i.e., English CDI score, Spanish IDHC score, and derivation of a conceptual vocabulary score) compare to established monolingual vocabulary norms?

9. Analysis Currently Underway • Videotaped interactions between parents and children • These spontaneous language measures will help minimize the limitation of using only standardized vocabulary measures to assess the concurrent validity of the CDI/IDHC, and particularly of the integrated conceptual vocabulary score

10. Continuing our collaboration:Head Start University Partnership-English Language Learners Grant (2007-2010) • Goals • Test whether shorter vocabulary checklists provide information that is just as valid as the longer checklists. • Pilot Spanish version of CDI-III for older preschoolers • Determine the age range for which each checklist is appropriate for ELL EHS/HS children • Refine parent and teacher brief questionnaires about children’s exposure to and use of their two languages at home and school • Together, this information on vocabulary and language use at home and school could become part of the child’s record and help inform decisions about special services for some children (HS Performance Standards 1304.20(b)(1))

11. Small Group Work • Review of vocabulary curricular materials

12. Complexity of Word Knowledge • Incrementality • Polysemy • Multidimensionality • Interrelatedness • Heterogeneity

13. Incrementality • Dale’s (1975) four stages: • Never saw it before • Heard it but don’t know what it means • Recognize it in context; has something to do with… • Know it well • Paribakht and Wesche (1997) added: • I can use this word in a sentence • Multiple interactions with words needed to learn it incidentally (4 encounters improves comprehension; 40 needed to attain a ceiling of knowledge)

14. Polysemy • Multiple meanings • Can be completely unrelated vs. can be so close that it’s a matter of subtle shades of meaning • Meanings change over time • Figurative language

15. Multidimensionality • Word knowledge represents a continuum • Consider the types of relationships: • Morphological relationships (prefixation, suffixation) • Semantic relationships (antonyms, synonyms) and categories (verb, noun, adjective) • Graves (1986) word learning tasks: • New concepts • New labels for known concepts • Moving words to productive vocabularies

16. Interrelatedness • Words are not isolated units of knowledge • Importance of linking what is learned with what is known • Exposure to text can contribute to one’s understanding of words in the text (building background knowledge), and even words not in the text

17. Heterogeneity • Knowledge of a word depends on what kind of word it is (e.g., if vs. hypotenuse) • The same word can require different types of learning depending on the learner and on what he/she knows about a word

18. The Scope of the Word Learning Problem • Only about 5-10% of class time devoted to vocabulary instruction • Minimal attention to word meanings, and often non-essential words • Labels vs. concepts • For native English speakers = 5-16 for receptive knowledge (Nation, 1990)

19. New Vocabulary Challenges for Adolescents • They usually know the easy words already • Basic object terms • Brief/monomorphemic forms • Really frequent words • Minimally polysemous words • Much word exposure comes through reading • They need content-area technical terms • They need all-purpose academic words • Category labels • Words for thinking • Abstract, low imageability terms

20. And if their L1 is not English… • They must learn English at the same time they are studying core content through English • They must perform “double the work” of native speakers to keep up, and at the same time be accountable for adequate yearly progress (AYP) • About 60% do not graduate from high school • And about 85% do not if limited English proficient

21. The Challenge for Teachers • Must balance comprehensible input and rich challenging vocabulary (i.e., academic language)!

22. Academic Language • Different from ‘everyday’ conversational language • Specialized registers, specialized knowledge • Explicit instruction needed, helping students become meta-cognitive about the difference between speech and print

23. Three Tiers (Beck et al., 2002) Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Basic More Content Specific Words Sophisticated Words baby negotiate litigation (law) happy tolerate troposphere (science) bad maintain isotope (math)

24. So what about cognates? • Many require sophisticated knowledge • Venomous, venenoso • Grotesque, grotesco • Lament, lamentar • False cognates • Library, libreria • Exit, exito • Molest, molestar

25. Mancilla-Martinez & Spencer (2007) • Teachers expected difficulty in reading comprehension and vocabulary, but relative strength in listening comprehension • Surprised to learn listening comprehension was a relative weakness and wanted to know why

26. GRADE Listening Comprehension Subtest • Task: Students listen to a sentence(s) that are read aloud to the class. Students select 1 of 4 pictures that best matches what was read by the examiner(17 items) • Measure of: Student’s ability to understand orally presented, connected speech without printed cues • Not intended as a measure of: short-term memory, background knowledge, advanced vocabulary

27. GRADE Item Type Classification • Vocabulary • Understanding of basic word, uncommon vocabulary word, or a word with multiple meanings by context of the sentence(s) • Grammar • Understanding of the structural aspects of language (e.g., word order, clauses, verb tense, subordination) • Inference • Understanding of the unspoken message based on information given or the context of the situation provided (drawing conclusions) • Idiom • Understanding of common idiomatic expressions that have a meaning different from the literal interpretation • Nonliteral • Understanding of the nonliteral rather than literal meaning of the spoken message (“reading between the lines”)

28. Item Characteristics (17 items)

29. Item Type and Average % Correct by Grade

30. What’s Hard About Listening Comp? • Inferential questions are relatively unproblematic • Grammar items are problematic for older students • Vocabulary and idioms/nonliteral items are common trouble areas But …what do their errors tell us? • Do the distractors provide additional insight about students’ performance on the test?

31. Types of Distractors (researcher-coded)

32. Selected Distractors

33. Distractor Analysis Conclusion • Patterns (e.g., distractor not selected at all, distractor selected more often than the correct response) suggest that listening comprehension is breaking down similarly for these students • Vocabulary and idiom/nonliteral distractors are disproportionately troublesome • Idioms tend to be interpreted literally, suggesting vocabulary constraints

34. Beyond Hearing • Listening comprehension involves multiple dimensions • What do we mean by listening comprehension? • This task requires students to process oral input and match it to the most precise representation • Vocabulary and idioms/nonliteral items are challenging across grades • interventions geared toward increasing vocabulary, implicitly (engaging in rich oral language interactions) and explicitly (teaching words and about words), seem necessary • Psychometric properties of a test normed on a national sample do not necessarily apply to a particular sub-population

35. 5th Grade Word Generation Classroom • Ms. Ross’ 5th grade class of 24 students • 100% former English Language Learners • Ms. Ross teaches all five days = 100 minutes/week of instructional time devoted to Word Generation

36. Multiple Choice Test Comparison

37. Top 3 Words Students Learned

38. And what have we learned about vocabulary development? • The principles established in research with pre-school aged and younger school-aged children work • But there is much more to learn about teaching ‘academic words’ • As always, implementation is a bigger challenge than developing curricula • Vocabulary instruction carries broader academic language skills with it

39. Monday/Tuesday:informal assessment, theories of word meaning, reading of passage, talk about topic, scanning of text/annotation Tuesday/Wednesday:informal assessment, group work relating words to world Wednesday/Thursday:debate Friday: essay writing