COMPONENTS OF EFFECTIVE VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION Educational psychologist Jerome Bruner coined the term “spiral curriculum” to suggest an iterative approach to learning (Bruner, 1960). He argued that a topic should be revisited multiple times during a course of study, with each encounter building on previous learning and progressively deepening a student’s understanding of the topic. What is learned in an early loop of the spiral is linked to new information learned in a later loop. Learning words benefits from such an approach, given that effective vocabulary instruction requires offering students many opportunities “to build their personal warehouse of words, to develop deep levels of word knowledge, and acquire a toolbox of strategies that aids their independent word acquisition” (Butler, Urrutia, Buenger, Gonzalez, Hunt, & Eisenhart, 2010, p. 7). Research has identified several attributes of vocabulary instruction that lead to these opportunities and help students expand their word warehouses.
Teach Words in Context
Learning words in context leads to greater vocabulary gains over time than rote memorization of words and their definitions (Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985; Nagy, Anderson, & Herman, 1987). In one study, two groups of 7- and 8-year-olds with limited vocabularies were taught a selection of new words. One group learned the words from definitions, while the other learned how to derive their meanings from context. Three months later, the context group showed significantly better comprehension of text containing many of the taught words. The students also effectively used the strategies they had learned to guess the meaning of unknown words (Nash & Snowling, 2006). As students encounter a word in different contexts, their knowledge of it grows incrementally. Each time, they learn a bit more about how words work and how they can take on new meanings and functions.
Read Related Texts
Background knowledge is the single best predictor of how well a person understands what they read (Gasparinatou & Grigoriadou, 2013; Ahmed, Francis, York, Fletcher, Barnes, & Kulesz, 2016). Without some knowledge of a topic, the words on the page are meaningless. Research shows that reading sets of related texts not only builds subject expertise but is also associated with growth in vocabulary acquisition (Cervetti, Wright, & Hwang, 2016). As students delve deeper into a topic, they can tap the knowledge they have acquired earlier to figure out the meanings of new words they encounter.
6
SCHOLASTIC W.O.R.D. FOUNDATION PAPER
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs