Vocabulary Instruction
Provide explicit vocabulary instruction and strategies to help students become independent vocabulary learners.
Expert Interview
A Classroom Scenario
Mary E. Curtis, Ph.D.Lesley University
In this interview Dr. Curtis describes what good vocabulary instruction would look like in a classroom. She addresses the need for explicit instruction and multiple practice opportunities in a variety of contexts. (5:15 min)
Key Concepts
- Dedicate a portion of regular classroom lessons to explicit vocabulary instruction.
- The amount of time dedicated to explicit instruction will be dictated by the vocabulary load of the text and the students' prior knowledge. Making certain that students are familiar with the vocabulary they will encounter in reading selections can help make the reading task easier. Computer instruction can be an effective way to provide practice on vocabulary and leverage classroom time.
- Provide repeated exposure to new words in multiple oral and written contexts and allow sufficient practice sessions.
- Words are usually learned only after they appear several times. In fact, researchers estimate that it could take as many as 17 exposures for a student to learn a new word. Repeated exposure could be in the same lesson or passage, but the exposures will be most effective if they appear over an extended period of time. Words that appear only once or twice in a text are typically not words that should be targeted for explicit instruction because there may never be enough practice to learn the words completely. Students should be provided with the definitions of these infrequent words.
- Give sufficient opportunities to use new vocabulary in a variety of oral and written contexts through activities such as discussion, writing, and extended reading.
- Opportunities for discussing and writing key words will help students to acquire a range of productive meanings for the words they are learning, and the correct way to use those words, to help them move beyond simply being able to recognize them in print.
- Provide students with strategies to make them independent vocabulary learners.
- One approach to vocabulary instruction is to help students identify components (prefixes, roots, suffixes) of words to derive the meaning of unfamiliar words; another is to make use of reference material such as glossaries included in their textbooks.