Revitalizing Vocabulary: Using Vocabulary Strategies To Aid Student Comprehension

1. Revitalizing Vocabulary: Using Vocabulary Strategies To Aid Student Comprehension How Children Learn to Read

2. Stages of Reading Development • Pre-reading; pre-alphabetic (0) • Initial reading or alphabetic decoding (1) • -Early phonetic • -Later phonetic • Confirmation and fluency (2) • Reading to learn (3)

3. Pre-Alphabetic (0) • Children try to remember some words by visual characteristic (yellow, elephant) • Children treat words as pictograms and make a direct association to meaning. (crest = toothpaste) • Children think the length of a word is equivalent to meaning. (snake is longer than caterpillar) snake caterpillar

4. Decoding: Early Phonetic (1) • Identify first consonant in work; need to learn to segment all sounds • Rely on letter names to get the sounds, especially for spelling; need to learn sounds and letter names, and the difference. (WEL = will, CLOK = clock) • Confuse similar words (horse and house); need to decode the whole word, left to right, with sound-symbol links. VS.

5. Decoding: Late Phonetic (1) • Can sound out regular one-syllable words; can increase speed of whole word recognition once decoding is accurate • Phoneme (smallest unit of sound in a language) awareness is well established. • Phonetic spelling is a fine art.

6. Confirmation and Fluency (2) • Can read more easily, attending to meaning. Need to increase speed to about 120 w.p.m. by end of third grade. • Print chunks, such as –ing, -est, high frequency words, and syllable patterns are recognized automatically. • Need to read widely. Series books are a good fit. Emphasis on daily reading very important.

7. Reading to Learn (3) • Build vocabulary, several thousand words per year. • Teach advanced word decoding. • Emphasize varied texts, especially expository (nonfiction) texts. • Preview and guide silent and prepared choral reading. Students in third grade need to be at this stage. If behind in third grade highly likely to remain behind.

8. Components of Reading Instruction(from Put Reading First) • Phoneme awareness and letter knowledge • Phonics, decoding, spelling, word recognition • Fluency • Vocabulary • Comprehension of text

9. Listening and Reading • Students’ vocabulary first develops through oral exposure to text. • Before middle grades, students can read many fewer words than they comprehend through listening. This remains true at the middle grades for at-risk students especially.

10. How Many Words Do Students Know? Students need to learn 2,000 to 3,000 new words each year from 3rd grade onward, about 6-8 per day. Students who are behind in first grade have difficulty making up the gap. Biemiller (1999).

11. How Many Words Do Students Know? (cont.) Impact of Language Exposure on Vocabulary Levels Actual Differences in Quantity of Words Heard In a typical hour, the average child would hear: Welfare: 615 words Working Class: 1,251 words Professional: 2,153 words Actual Differences in Quality of Words Heard In a typical hour, the average child would hear: Welfare: 5 affirmations, 11 prohibitions Working Class: 12 affirmations, 7 prohibitions Professional: 32 affirmations, 5 prohibitions

12. Where Do We Learn Words? Even children’s books have more varied and unusual words than prime time TV or children’s TV. Rarity and variety of words in children’s books is greater than that in adult conversation. Adult reading matter contains words 2-3 times rarer than those hear on TV. Hayes & Ahrens (1998)

13. Where Do We Learn Words? (cont.)Reading Volume and Vocabulary Growth Source: Adapted from “Vocabulary Simplification for Children: A Special Case of ‘Motherese’?” (1988) by D. P. Hayes and M.G. Ahrens in Journal of Child Language, Vol. 15, No. 2. *A rank of 10,000 or higher is considered infrequent, or rare. Ex: The word amplified has a rank of 16,000.

14. How We Know Words

15. How We Know Words (Stage: Decoding) By reading: • At the right level of difficulty, • In sufficient amounts, and • With sufficient motivation to pursue understanding. 2 READING

16. How We Know Words (Stage: Confirmation & Fluency) • Through exposure to multiple examples in context, spoken and written. • Through explicit instruction: • Constructing definitions and using personal language • Analyzing word structure • Exploring word relationships

17. How We Know Words (Stage: Reading To Learn) By becoming conscious (acquiring decontextualized knowledge): • of the word’s sound and morphemes • of the word’s original form • of the word’s usage and multiple meanings The text is an easy read. Please text me by 5:00 p.m.

18. What Reading Does for the Mind • The amount children read predicts vocabulary and reading comprehension in high school. • Reading volume contributes to verbal intelligence (word definitions, background knowledge, fluency, spelling). Stanovich, K. E., West, R. F., Cunningham, A. E., Cipielewski, J., & Siddiqui, S. (1996)

19. Do Students Read? • The average 5th grader reads less than five minutes per day outside of school. • 5th graders at the 80th percentile read over twenty times as many words as students reading at the 20th percentile, who read less than one minute outside of school each day. Biemiller (1999), Language and Reading Success

20. Middle Grades Symptoms • Struggling students continue to be slow readers. • Vocabulary often does not grow at expected rate. • Spelling phonetically and misspelled words continues. • Complex sentences and inference information are problematic. • Writing is sparse and disorganized.

21. Final Thoughts Literacy development is an ongoing process, and it requires just as much attention for adolescent learner as for beginning readers. In today’s word, literacy demands are expanding, and they include more reading and writing tasks than at any other time in history. Adolescents need high levels of literacy to understand vast amounts of information available to them. Adequate comprehension depends on the reader already knowing 90-95% of the words in a text.

22. Resources Biemiller, A. 2005, Size and sequence in vocabulary development: Implications for choosing words for primary grade vocabulary instruction. In A. Hiebert. & M. Kamil, (Eds.), Teaching and Learning Vocabulary: Bringing Research to Practice   Mahwah, NJ: Earlbaum. Andrew Biemiller, A. 1999, Brookline Books, The Living Word Vocabulary Hayes & Ahrens. 1988, cited in Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998, What Reading Does for the Mind, American Educator. Language and Reading Success, a title in From Reading Research to Practice: A Series for Teachers, Brookline Books, 1999. Nagy, W. E. and Scott, J. A. (2000). Vocabulary Processes. In M. L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, R. Barr (Eds.) Handbook of Reading Research. (Vol. III. Pp. 269-284). Mahwan, NJ: Earlbaum. N. C. Teacher Academy, 2007, The Focus on Early Literacy. Stanovich, K. E., West, R. F., Cunningham, A. E., Cipielewski, J., & Siddiqui, S. 1996, The role of inadequate print exposure as a determinant of reading comprehension problems. In C. Cornoldi & J. Oakhill (Eds.), Reading comprehension disabilities: processes and intervention . Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.