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.

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).