How to Teach Vocabulary to Young Students

How to Teach Vocabulary to Young Students
By Baliey Johnson

Oh no! My child is not reading on grade level! Is it their vocabulary? Vocabulary is essential to comprehending what is read. Is this hurting my child's comprehension? Learning how to read is essential to be successful in school and to achieve anything in life. Whether a child decides to attend a 4-year college, community college, technical college, or go into the military, reading is necessary.

So you ask, what is vocabulary, really? It is knowledge of a word that not only implies a definition, but also how the word fits into the world. As a parent, your child should be adding from 2,000 to 3,000 words each year to their reading vocabulary, according to Michael Graves, Vocabulary Book Learning and Instruction. I know you are thinking, WOW, how are they going to do that?

This would include words such as do, did, does, etc. That counts as three words. These are called word families.

There is a correlation between word knowledge and reading comprehension. If a student doesn't understand vocabulary words, understanding what is read is going to be difficult. However, it is essential to understand that vocabulary knowledge is never mastered. It just continues to deepen over a lifetime. Learning vocabulary helps you to communicate in a more powerful, persuasive and creative way.

There is also a difference between oral vocabulary and written vocabulary. A student may understand a word that is spoken orally but may not have any idea what it looks like written. The opposite may also occur, they may know what it is written, but may be mispronouncing it and not know what the word is.

It was once thought that learning words meant you were to look them up in a dictionary, and that was the end of the learning. However, more and more teachers are using vocabulary strategies such as connecting words to pictures.

Teachers begin to introduce words using images of what the word could be and what it is not. Word knowledge increases when students are able to associate the word with a visual. The brain then stores the image of the word. Then the word is learned with associations and connections.

As a parent, helping your student learn the words with multiple exposures will vastly increase their word knowledge. The student needs to see the words in different texts and just discussing the word. This gets the student engaged and seriously thinking about the meaning of the word.

Let's look at the word: DRIVE. There are several definitions, but we will discuss three main ones.

1. Drive: to drive a car.

2. Drive: a computer hardDRIVE.

3. Drive: to drive your point across in a discussion.

Ensuring a student understands each definition and when to use the word is essential in comprehension. Adequate reading comprehension is to understand 90-95% of the words you read. To achieve this goal, the more you read, the more vocabulary you acquire.

So, what can a parent do? Pleasant Valley Elementary School in Groton, CT has excellent parent tips for helping your student build their vocabulary knowledge. Some of their tips include: read daily, play verbal games, have your student to classify and group words. Vocabulary strategies for a parent to help their student are not difficult and need surely no preparation.

Dr. Johnson has taught reading for elementary and middle school students for over 20 years. She has more information on vocabulary strategies on http://www.instrucology.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Baliey_Johnson
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Teach-Vocabulary-to-Young-Students&id=7573070

Vocabulary, Education and Success - How Are They Related?

Vocabulary, Education and Success - How Are They Related?
By Lee W Reed

We are told that the average high school graduate has a vocabulary of 10 to 12 thousands words. I usually tell the middle school students I teach that they most likely have a vocabulary of about 8 thousand words. That's probably about right, though we can't help but wonder what texting is doing to our kid's vocabulary. Research done some years ago indicated that the average phone call used no more than 800 different words. How this research was done, I don't know, but it is an interesting factoid.

College has a profound effect on our vocabulary. There we have to read a great deal of the writings of highly intelligent people with great vocabularies and that has the effect of increasing our list of words we use. As a matter of fact, there is a stereotype of a newly minted college student who returns home and wishes to impress his/her friends with a host of new words. Eventually we learn that the real purpose of our speech is to communicate and we put aside the fancy words in place of those that will be effective with our audience. Nevertheless, by the time a student graduates from college they should have a vocabulary of close to 20 thousand words; nearly double what they had when they graduated high school.

All this talk of vocabulary begs another question: Exactly how many words are there in the English language? As it happens, English may be the richest of all languages when it comes to words. We have borrowed words from other languages and added many of our own until the Oxford English Dictionary lists 615 thousand words in our language. By comparison, German has just 185 thousand and French just 100 thousand. Winston Churchill is said to have had one of the greatest vocabularies of our time and he probably knew far fewer than half the total (perhaps close to 80,000.) Shakespeare had an exceptional grasp of the language and use over 60 thousand in his works. Some people who have particularly large vocabularies, especially those who read and write a great deal, have in the neighborhood of 60 to 80 thousand words. Typically, they make a game of learning new words, so to them, finding a new word they can use is like finding buried treasure.

One of the astonishing things about vocabulary is the number of words students have to learn in medical school. I mentioned that the average college graduate knows about 20 thousand words. The average medical doctor possesses a 40 thousand word vocabulary. Another doubling of the words they use in just a few short years. This is indicative of the intense learning these students do as they work their way through medical school.

There are number of voices out there that will tell you that people who have large vocabularies tend to be more successful than those who do not. The implication is that your paltry word skills are holding you back and if you just memorized more words you, too, could be successful. This is shaky logic at best. I suspect the reason that many people who are successful have large vocabularies is because they have graduate degrees to go with them. They also tend to read a great deal. Simply learning all the words these folks know will not give you their wisdom or judgment, which is why they were given there positions of authority in the first place.

One of the amazing things that is happening on the Internet right now is that prestigious schools are beginning to offer their coursework for free online. MIT was a pioneer in this area as the posted all the classes necessary to earn a degree in engineering from their school, online and free of charge. Of course, you would still need to buy the books, and they are not cheap, but you could ostensibly learning everything an MIT grade knows for a small fraction of the cost. By this method, you could not only learn all the words of a graduate, but also learning the principles that go with them. What you would not get for your efforts is a degree. For that you would have to pay all the usual matriculation fees.

It's an interesting thought; what could you do with an engineers training, but no degree? The jury is still out on that decision, but several students are giving it a try. It will be interesting to watch this trend in the future to see how things work out. One thing is certain, many other school have followed MIT's lead and are offering similar courses, including Harvard, Berkley, McGill and a host of others. It's a trend worth watching.

Lee Reed is a logophile, word lover, who has a respectable grasp of the English language and loves to write about it as well as the interesting things he has learned in his numerous travels. You can find more of his words at: http://teachingadayatatime.wordpress.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lee_W_Reed
http://EzineArticles.com/?Vocabulary,-Education-and-Success---How-Are-They-Related?&id=7713182

Developing A Wide Subject Vocabulary-Guidelines for the Teacher

Developing A Wide Subject Vocabulary-Guidelines for the Teacher
By Richard D Boyce

As a teacher, your class will take its lead from you in all that you do. The use of language is the first place this will start. Your example of using the language of the subjects you teach must be at the highest possible level. That doesn't mean to use words whose meanings are not known to the class but rather ones which enhance a child's progress.

Obviously, any new terminology you use in each subject must be explained and used in ways to consolidate the new work to be learnt. Below are some ways you could enhance the students' understanding of the use of language.

• Colourful language. This does add interest or excitement to what you say or teach. No one says that when you teach you must use boring language. Use words that add colour and excitement to what you teach. Make it a goal of yours to look for ways to add colourful language particularly to the more difficult topics that you teach.
• Use the language of the subject discipline often. Teach the class the origin and meaning of each new term that you introduce.
• Create a spelling list of terms as you teach each topic. Some texts provide the lists for you.
• Have a quiz of these terms often. Have little spelling bees/contests.
• Have what I might call a definition test/quiz where the students write a definition of a subject term in simple language to explain its meaning to a person who has never seen the word before.
• In your own speaking, learn to say the same ideas in as many ways as possible to give constant examples to your class about how to use our language in a variety of ways.
• Insist that your students use the terms of the subject discipline in their answers to questions they write and in the questions or answers they ask or give.

Many modern syllabuses contain a requirement that communication as a skill in the subject must be assessed as part of the total assessment program. This implies that the student must use the terminology of the subject in their answers to all assessment tasks to show understanding of the language of the subject being tested.

The student needs a good base in the language of the subject to know what is required in each assessment task before they can begin to answer the question and answer in such a way as to show understanding of the subject.

During the last 16 years of his teaching career, our author, as Head of Mathematics, had to implement within his school's assessment program a new marking criteria in the assessment of Mathematics. That criterion was testing a student's communication skills in Mathematics. This meant he had to provide teacher inservice and make changes to the work programs to teach the students how to communicate in Mathematics. Go to http://www.realteachingsolutions.com for more information on this and other assessment issues.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Richard_D_Boyce
http://EzineArticles.com/?Developing-A-Wide-Subject-Vocabulary-Guidelines-for-the-Teacher&id=7702117