by Heather Miller
Vocabulary development is an essential part of reading comprehension. According to the National Reading Panel (2000), adolescent readers who struggle with word knowledge will struggle with reading comprehension and other academic work. Teaching vocabulary is important to help students gain skills for understanding text. Content areas are specifically dependent on vocabulary knowledge to understand important concepts being taught.
According to the National Reading Panel Report (2000), learning vocabulary words is an important factor to understanding print and learning to read. Teaching words for the purpose of concept understanding involves students making connections between words. Vacca, Vacca, and Mraz (2011) explained that students need to access their prior knowledge in order to connect it to new vocabulary. Vacca et al. state, “Concepts are learned by acting on and interacting with the environment” (p. 241). Students need to be engaged with the information in order to comprehend the full meaning of the text.
Word knowledge is part of every discipline in education. According to Tompkins (2006), "Students develop knowledge of a word slowly, through repeated exposure to the word” (p. 191). As students are learning more information, they acquire different kinds of word knowledge. It is a building process that relies on learning basic phonemes and progressing to whole words and their meanings. Each discipline has its own vocabulary that students may or may not know. “Learning the vocabulary of a discipline should be thought of as learning about the interconnectedness of ideas and concepts indexed by words” (Dougherty Stahl & Bravo, 2010, p. 568).
Concepts taught in content area subjects, such as science, rely heavily on content area vocabulary. Teaching these concepts in a way students will understand and be able to apply is challenging. Typically, the practice has been for students to write down the word and definition, study the list, and take a test over the assigned words (Greenwood, 2004). Students may be able to recite a word and definition from memory, but most do not fully grasp the concepts associated. Greenwood (2004) states, “Traditional vocabulary instruction is built on shifting sand: the assumption is that knowing a definition is the same thing as thoroughly and flexibly knowing a word’s meaning” (p. 2). This one- dimensional approach can only assess students’ recall or memorization abilities. Spencer and Guillaume (2006) examined word knowledge as an in-depth multidimensional process. They found that understanding a word involves knowing the definition, how to pronounce it, how it is associated with other words, and how to write it in a sentence correctly.
Content Contribution
Heather Miller is currently a teacher at Willow Springs Middle School in Willow Springs, MO. She has been teaching for four years and currently teaches sixth grade science.
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