Vocabulary (Word Content) Treatment - W8 Flashcards
Why is it hard to work on vocabulary?
- Big difference between academic & conversational vocabulary
- Too many words (TD. avg. vocab growth = 1,000-2,000 wrds/year)
- Learning a definition is not the same as knowing a word
2 components of vocabulary intervention
- Teach specific words (beyond definitions)
- Teach word-learning strategies
How do you teach specific words (beyond definitions)?
- Discuss semantic features & relations
- Define
- Use appropriately in all modalities
- Read and spell
What are word learning strategies you can teach?
- Use context
- Recognize word parts
- Finding definitions of words your don’t know
Considerations for picking which words to teach (6)
- Frequency
- Dispersion (does it occur across different subject areas)
- Morphological potential
- Semantic relatedness (can we teach it as part of a network of related words?)
- Conceptual difficulty
- How important is this word to current curriculum?
- Does the student WANT or NEED to know the word?
What tier of word is most highly recommended to be taught?
Tier 2 words
What are characteristics of Tier 1 words?
- Basic, frequent words
- Rarely require direct instruction
- ex: clock, baby, happy, walk
- approx. 8,000 word families
What are characteristics of Tier 2 words?
- Used w/high frequency by mature language users
- Occur in a variety of domains
- ex: fortunate, measure, industrious, coincidence
- approx. 7,000 word families
What are characteristics of Tier 3 words?
- Low frequency
- Limited to specific knowledge domains
- ex: peninsula, refinery, asphalt
- approx. 400,000 word families
Are Tier 3 words the hardest?
Not necessarily
ex: piano is a tier 3 word
Which tier is most likely to contain multiple meaning (polysemous) words?
Tier 2
Which tier of words characterizes written text
Tier 2
Which tier should you choose to get the most “mileage” from your vocabulary intervention?
Tier 2
Principles of teaching vocabulary? (9)
- Provide extended instruction
- Provide rich and varied language experiences with a word
- Provide for active engagement
- Relate new words to background knowledge
- Distributed practice
- Multimodality
- Increase imageability and concreteness
- Teach all aspects of the word: spelling, part of speech, synonyms, other semantically related words, etc.
- Teach strategies for acquiring new words independently
What to teach for word-learning strategies?
- How to use dictionaries and other reference materials (thesaurus, word processor, make sure there’s incentive for recognizing and referencing unknown words)
- Word parts (affixes, base words, word roots)
- How to use context cues (grammatical function, other known words)
- Encourage word consciousness
