Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

1. Explicit Vocabulary Instruction For ALL Teachers

2. Why Explicit Instruction? • Teaching vocabulary has been shown to increase students’ comprehension of new content by 12 percentile points. (Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986) • Teaching words before they are encountered in text increases students’ ability to comprehend the words by a factor of 1/3. (Jenkins, Stein & Wysocki, 1984) • Explicit vocabulary instruction is critical for struggling readers. (Beck, McKeown& Kucan, 2002)

3. What is Explicit Vocabulary Instruction? • Goes beyond the traditional procedure of having students copy a list of words, look up definitions, and memorize. • Provides clear, unambiguous presentation of word meanings. • Offers multiple exposures to target words. • Requires sufficient instructional time. • Requires students to be actively engaged.

4. How do you choose vocabulary words to teach? • Experts suggest you teach 3-10 vocabulary terms in depth for each specific body of knowledge to be introduced. (Archer & Hughes, 2011, p. 55) • Choosing vocabulary words to teach is often a chore of paring down rather than seeking out.

5. Guidelines for choosing words to teach explicitly • Select words that are unknown • Select words that are important to understanding the passage or unit • Select words students will hear, read, write and say in the future. • Select words that are difficult to learn and need interpretation

6. Choosing Words to Teach • Look at the list of words, choose 4 you would teach to your class. • Discuss your choices with a partner. • How do your choices follow the guidelines you just read? Review Evidence Simplest Community Environment Team Frightened Design Academic Priority Lightning Effective

7. That was a trick… You should not have been able to choose words from the previous slide without knowing more about what you’re teaching, your students’ prior knowledge, and the purpose of the reading. Remember! Vocabulary is used to enhance reading; it should not be a stand-alone activity.

8. How to explicitly teach vocabulary: • Say the word repeatedly “Ladies and gents, the word is bogus. Bogus. We are learning the word bogus.” • Students ALL repeat the word “What’s the word? That’s right, the word is bogus.”

9. How to explicitly teach vocabulary: • Break it up “How many syllables in the word bogus? Clap it out, bog – us. Yep, two syllables in bogus.” • Student ALL repeat the word “What’s the word?”

10. How to explicitly teach vocabulary: • Use a kid-friendly, content specific definition. Remember, you are not teaching all the definitions, just the one that is essential to the learning. “Bogus means something that is fake. Bogus means something that is fake. So that means something in our reading today is going to be fake, in other words it’s (all respond) bogus.”

11. How to explicitly teach vocabulary: • Give an example and a non-example “If someone has a fake diamond ring than the diamond in their ring is bogus.” “The book on your desk is not bogus because it’s real, it’s a real book not a bogus book.”

12. How to explicitly teach vocabulary: • Have students use the word in a sentence. The sentence must be at least 7 words long. “Turn to your partner and use the word bogus in a sentence. Number 1s go first, then 2s, then 3s. Go!” • Monitor student’s work, then ask for examples.