Post #2: Vocabulary

As a future classroom teacher, vocabulary is an area of instruction that I value. Vocabulary is a discipline that transcends the classroom and permeates into real-life situations through college admissions tests, professional emails, formal letters, interviews, everyday conversations, you name it! Varying word choice and using an impressive vocabulary in both writing and speaking demonstrates professionalism, maturity, and intellect. Understanding what one reads or hears in its entirety, including the "big words," is an irreplaceable life skill.

Why then, I often wonder, is vocabulary taught in such a rote manner? While reading McKeown and Beck's article, "Direct and Rich Vocabulary Instruction," I found myself reflecting upon the vocabulary instruction I received throughout my years of schooling. I did not find it to be direct or rich. Throughout middle school and high school, my classmates and I copied definitions, filled-in-the-blanks, wrote sentences, and anything else our hollow and repetitive "vocab books" told us to do.

In elementary school, vocabulary instruction was intertwined with reading and spelling, and was not yet given the "vocabulary" label as it was in middle school and beyond. However, from what I do remember during K-4th grade, we learned new vocabulary words using a simplified version of the same rote practices - define, fill-in, write a sentence.

The only "direct instruction" I experienced when it came to vocabulary was our teachers reading the answers to the homework aloud. Vocabulary work was seen as a time-filler, a homework assignment, or something to do when we had a sub. By junior year of high school, our workbooks were replaced with an online vocabulary program that guided us through the same activities, only with sound effects. Then, vocabulary became more about the SATs, and less about if we actually gained full understanding of the long lists of words and roots we were assigned to learn (memorize) each week. I remember feeling frustrated with the large amounts of "busy work" related to vocabulary, and wondered if I would even remember the countless words and definitions thrown at me by my senior year of college.

In case you're wondering, I would say that about 40% of the vocabulary words I learned throughout middle and high school stuck with me. That's because 40% of the vocabulary words I learned throughout middle and high school proved meaningful to me. They were meaningful because I made them meaningful. They were the words that I encountered in reading, words that I used in conversation, words that I peppered into papers and projects. The words that stuck with me were the words that were useful to me because of what I, as the student, chose to do with them.

"Because comprehension is a complex process, a reader may well need knowledge of a different character than mere accuracy of definitions of words in the text to facilitate the process" (17).

While reading McKeown and Beck's article, I found myself nodding my head in agreement with their concepts of focusing direct instruction on Tier 2 words, as well as the questionable reliability of learning new words through context alone. What struck me most in their article, however, were the suggested instructional strategies for teaching vocabulary words in an active and engaging way. Making connections to personal experiences, such as asking students to think about a time they consoled someone, as well as posing questions that enable students to compare/contrast word meanings, such as "Could a miser be a tyrant?" are two methods of direct instruction that simply take the unattractive practices of copying definitions and writing sentences to the next level, where students are actually prompted to think about the word's meaning as a concept, and use knowledge of that word's meaning to draw an authentic conclusion. Interactive methods also help establish student ownership of learning, which acts as a natural motivator in the classroom. Use of word lines and example/non-example prompts are two additional strategies that allow students to enter into an internal dialogue with these words as they decipher their true and comprehensive meanings. These strategies seem fairly easy to implement as a teacher, and I can't help but feel a little betrayed by my ELA teachers of the past for failing to create a meaningful vocabulary learning experience in the classroom.