#VOCABULARY TEACHER RESOURCES PROFESSIONAL#

Assist children with vocabulary deficits by providing them with the same sort of highly interactive, language-rich environment that advantaged children have at home. These children do not have a larger vocabulary because they are smarter – rather, they are smarter because they have a larger vocabulary. Children whose parents talk to them often on a range of topics come to school with a much larger vocabulary than children from homes where talk is limited.

Find ways to increase the amount of reading that students are doing, and they inevitably will build vocabulary.

Most importantly, students need to read a lot to have the frequent encounters with words in different contexts that lead to true word knowledge the sheer volume of reading matters. Students are likely to develop vocabulary more rapidly when the books they read are not only easy enough to read fluently but also contain unfamiliar words. Researchers have found that students who read just 10 minutes a day outside of school demonstrate significantly higher rates of vocabulary growth than students who do almost no reading outside of school (Nagy and Anderson 1984). The single most effective way of helping students build vocabulary is by increasing the amount that they read. Teachers can help students increase vocabulary by including powerful, difficult words in their oral language while they teach, and encouraging students to use those words in their speaking and writing. Researchers conclude that teachers can have the biggest impact on vocabulary by increasing the amount of incidental word learning (Nagy and Herman 1987). The rest come from their everyday experiences with oral communication, listening to text read aloud, and reading a wide variety of texts independently. Generally, school-age children learn about 3,000 new words a year, but only about 10 percent of these words come from direct vocabulary instruction. Strategies for fostering vocabulary development fall into two broad categories: teaching strategies for vocabulary directly and learning new words indirectly. If education is truly to be the 'great leveler' and provide all children access to the same opportunities, teachers must somehow find ways to reverse this trend and help all children develop a rich working vocabulary. Research also shows that children who enter school with a vocabulary deficit tend to continue to fall behind through the course of their schooling. As a result, by the age of three, children in 'professional' families actually had a larger vocabulary than the parents with low-incomes (Hart and Risley 1995).

#VOCABULARY TEACHER RESOURCES PROFESSIONAL#

For example, researchers have found a difference of almost 300 spoken words per hour between parents who hold professional positions and parents on welfare. Unfortunately, research also shows marked differences in vocabulary development in students from high- and low-income families, with a widening gap during the first three years in the lives of children – much of which can be attributed to the level of verbal interactions that children have with their parents. Research shows that the proportion of 'difficult' words in a text is the single most important predictor of the difficulty of the text, while the size of a person's vocabulary is the best predictor of how well that person can understand the text (Anderson and Freebody 1981). Vocabulary development, for example, is crucial to success in reading. The size of a person's working vocabulary is both a measure of educational attainment and a key to academic and career success. To develop students' vocabulary, teachers must encourage a curiosity about the meaning and use of unfamiliar words and promote the use of strategies that will help students find the meaning of unfamiliar words. Reading: the words we understand when we read

Listening: the words we understand when we hear them One of the most important responsibilities of every teacher is to help students develop a strong working vocabulary.

Vocabulary teacher resources