Tim Shanahan is one of the country’s foremost experts on literacy. He’s a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he founded and directed its Center for Literacy. Though he understands the research on reading as well as anyone in the field, he’s also done plenty of real-world work, having been principal…
We’ve just finished our chapter on vocabulary in Reading Reconsidered. In it, we describe ways to teach new words directly (Explicit Vocabulary Instruction) and ways to increase how much word knowledge students absorb from reading words in texts (Implicit Vocabulary Instruction). The following is from our discussion of Explicit Vocabulary Instruction and talks about the key…
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…
This morning my daughter (6) successfully decoded the words “exotic” & “species” when she saw them in print for (I assume) the first time. She struggled to get halfway through exotic and then suddenly she got it. “Ex… ex-OAT… ex-AH… exotic!” She succeeded, to make an obvious but important point, because she already knew those words….
Bringing Words to Life is a landmark book for me and many other educators on the topic of vocabulary instruction. It’s hard to say what the three most important ideas in it are because there are so many, but one of the most widely discussed in Beck, McKeown and Kucan’s discussion is how to choose which…