VOCABULARY Vocabulary is an essential building block of reading because students use word knowledge that they have acquired through oral language to make sense of words that they see in print. As students use their phonics skills to sound out new or unfamiliar words while reading, they also make connections with their own oral vocabulary (Beck & McKeown, 2007). Most experts agree that there are four types of vocabulary: listening , speaking (sometimes known as oral vocabulary when combined with listening), reading , and writing . Proficiency in reading vocabulary is more difficult to achieve than it is in oral vocabulary because it depends upon quick, precise, and automatic recognition of the words in the text. Also, written words, figures of speech, syntax, and text structures are more complex than those that a student would encounter in everyday conversation (Mason, 2001; Medo & Ryder, 1993; Schleppegrell, 2001). Vocabulary is an essential component of reading comprehension. Students need to recognize words and understand them in context of the text in order to make sense of what they read. If a word that is decoded is not in a student’s oral vocabulary, then the student may have difficulty with comprehension even if they can sound it out accurately. “Vocabulary acquisition is crucial to academic development. Not only do students need a rich body of word knowledge to succeed in basic skill areas, they also need a specialized vocabulary to learn content area material” (Baker, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1995, p. 209). Only when students can decode and comprehend the words they are reading can they start to learn new information while reading (Moats, 2004; Nagy & Scott, 2000). Most importantly, once a student learns to read, vocabulary is essential to make that step toward reading to learn. Ongoing vocabulary instruction has also been shown to support reading comprehension in early readers (Brett, Rothlein, & Hurley, 1996).
New Words
Not all words students encounter in texts will exist in their oral language. Each new word needs to be identified, decoded, and understood. As a student builds on the five foundational skills, they can use phonemic or phonetic knowledge for decoding. In order to sound out and comprehend words more quickly, students must have meaningful encounters with letters and phonemes. “Quality encounters connect letters in a spelling to phonemes in the pronunciation, usually by sounding out and blending” (Murray, 2012, p. 36). Through targeted instruction around phonemes and words, letter combinations become more recognizable and a student can decode a new word faster.
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