Reading Specialist Blog

Independent word-learning strategies are procedures that you can model and teach explicitly to your students to show them how to figure out the meanings of unfamiliar words.

Vocabulary Resources: Books & Articles

Given growing number of English Learners in our schools and the strong relationship between vocabulary and comprehension, finding ways to build the English vocabularies of these students is especially important.

Intentional vocabulary instruction is most successful when it helps students establish connections among their current reading, their existing knowledge, and the concepts to be learned (Stahl, 1999), and when it ensures that students have opportunities to see and use the words many times. Indeed, for students to make words their own, they must continue to use the words after initial instruction, and they must see the words over differing contexts (McKeown & Beck, 2003; Beck et al., 2002).

Intentional, direct vocabulary instruction is instruction that targets specific words and provides students with learning activities that develop in-depth knowledge of those words—or to know words well enough to call up from memory information about them as they see them in their reading—and with strategies to help students learn related words on their own.

When we talk about vocabulary, we generally mean “knowledge of words and word meanings.” However, to researchers, vocabulary is far more complex. Often they make the distinction between oral vocabulary, or the words we recognize and use in listening and speaking; and print vocabulary, or the words we recognize and use as in reading and writing. They may further refine these terms into listening vocabulary, speaking vocabulary, and reading vocabulary. In general, though, researchers refer to our store of oral words as our receptive vocabulary and that of print words as our productive vocabulary.