05.20.15From Reading Reconsidered: On Teaching Vocabulary
Another excerpt coming at you from the throes of finalizing Reading Reconsidered. This excerpt is on our two-pronged approach to Vocabulary.
To command words is to master both their breadth and their depth. Reading for anything more than basic comprehension relies on the a reader’s capacity to understand both a large number of words (breadth) and also the subtleties and the nuances of many of those words (depth), even when those words change their meaning with the setting.
As a result, effective vocabulary instruction is one of the greatest and most important challenges facing schools and teachers today. It must prepare students to master both breadth and depth in both production and reception of language—in writing and in reading. It must close a gap of, conservatively, several thousand words, and ensure that students can comprehend the exact nuance of a given word on which a passage’s meaning may hinge even though which word will be the lynchpin can never be predicted. It is, in short, a daunting challenge that requires far more strategy that memorizing a few definitions or presuming (erroneously) that we can teach students to infer meanings form context clues.
It can be helpful to think of vocabulary instruction as divided into two categories, the first of which is Explicit Instruction. Explicit instruction is the kind of teaching and word study that teachers use to introduce a discrete and limited number of new words to students. Explicit Vocabulary lessons are deep dives into a limited number of individual words, rather than an introduction and gloss-over of multiple words. It is not enough for students to simply recite the definition of a word. Mastery of a word also means that students can accurately use the word in multiple contexts, flexibly adapt the word into its different forms, and understand the connotation and degree of the word. Explicit Vocabulary addresses this, teaching specific, highly applicable words deeply and modeling for students the depth and adaptability of words.
For example, a science teacher may introduce four new words in her unit on energy and force (velocity, acceleration, force, motion). She may spend ten minutes or so introducing each word, using a variety of strategies and approaches. Similarly, a reading teacher may choose to explicitly teach three or four new words her students will encounter in a particular text (and in future texts)—words that might enable them to articulate a nuanced analysis of the text. Each of these strategies is part of Explicit Instruction, a vital way of building depth of word knowledge.
While teaching vocabulary deeply, directly, and systematically is critical to developing the kind of word knowledge that supports rigorous textual interpretation and strong literary discourse, it just isn’t sufficient by itself. The sheer number of words that students need to incorporate into their working vocabulary is astounding. For many students, particularly those whose word knowledge, for whatever reason, has not been supercharged by extensive learning from an early age, deep teaching of a few words a day will never come close to ensuring sufficient coverage of enough words to fill the vocabulary gap.
Teachers need to use intentional methods to increase the rate at which words encountered during reading are absorbed into their functioning vocabularies. We call this second category of vocabulary instruction Implicit Vocabulary Instruction. Its techniques help students attend to new words they encounter while reading a text and increase their likelihood of remembering them and aspects of their usage. If Explicit Instruction is, roughly, a set of tools to teach words directly, Implicit Instruction is a set of tools designed to maximize the number of words absorbed from reading. There are many arguments that contest which one of these methods is superior. The answer, we think, is that they are both necessary.
