Vocabulary Instruction
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Description: Teaching Vocabulary - This article provides some excellent lesson models for teaching vocabulary, explaining idioms, fostering word consciousness, instruction for English Language Learners, and mnemonic strategies.
Description: Five Research-Based Ways to Teach Vocabulary - What Research Says about Effective Vocabulary Instruction: Vocabulary instruction must be explicit. Explicit vocabulary instruction includes an easy-to-understand definition presented directly to students along with multiple examples and nonexamples of the target word, brief discussion opportunities, and checks for understanding. Vocabulary instruction must include multiple practice opportunities for using words within and across subjects....
Description: Vocabulary words: An evidence-based literacy strategy - In this article, you’ll learn how to explicitly teach vocabulary using easy-to-understand definitions, engaging activities, and repeated exposure. This strategy includes playing vocabulary games, incorporating visual supports like graphic organizers, and giving students the chance to see and use new words in real-world contexts. The goal of this teaching strategy isn’t just to increase your students’ vocabulary....
Description: What Should Morphology Instruction Look Like? - Literacy expert Timothy Shanahan shares best practices for teaching reading and writing. Dr. Shanahan is an internationally recognized professor of urban education and reading researcher who has extensive experience with children in inner-city schools and children with special needs. All posts are reprinted with permission from Shanahan on Literacy.
Description: This Science of Reading inforgraphic shows the What, Why and How of Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Fluency and Vocabulary which all lead to Comprehension. This infographic is from R.I.S.E. Arkansas.
Description: The Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction - To be effective, a program of vocabulary instruction should provide students with opportunities for word learning by: encouraging wide reading; exposing students to high-quality oral language; promoting word consciousness; providing explicit instruction of specific words; and providing modeling and instruction in independent word-learning strategies. Each of these components contributes to helping students overcome the major obstacles to...
Description: This five-part webinar series takes a closer look at essential subskills of the language comprehension side of the Simple View of Reading—background knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge.
Description: Teaching Morphology to Improve Literacy - Morphological awareness provides a powerful tool for improving many areas of literacy: Vocabulary comprehension Reading aloud Spelling Phonological awareness Reading comprehension
Description: Guiding Principles of Structured Word Inquiry (“scientific word investigation”) The primary function of English spelling is to represent meaning. The conventions by which English spelling represents meaning are so well-ordered and reliable that spelling can be investigated and understood through scientific inquiry. Scientific inquiry is necessary to safely guide spelling instruction and understanding. Scientific inquiry is the only means by which a learning community can safely...
Description: Joan Sedita explores the power of writing to support students’ reading comprehension.
Description: 20 Effective Vocabulary Activities for Middle School - Teaching vocabulary in middle school can be quite challenging. Not only are the words becoming more difficult, but students are also becoming less and less interested. Creating and finding activities that will help to keep kids engaged and excited about vocabulary instruction is vital to having a successful classroom community. It's also important to switch up the activities from time to time. Therefore, having a strong foundation of...
Description: Anita Archer shares ways to support intermediate struggling readers through evidence-based practices.
Description: Dr. Deb Glaser’s presentation is on the impact of incorporating morphological analysis into the intermediate grades.
Description: 2022 Annual Conference Session Recordings Keynote: From Science to Poetry in the Teaching of Reading: Reflections in a Digital Culture, Maryanne Wolf Day 1: 1A: The Science of Reading - Definition and Beyond, Stephanie Stollar 1B: Climbing the Ladder of Reading & Writing: Some Children Climb More Slowly While Other Children Leap Up, Nancy Young 1C: Implementation Matters: Literacy Leadership as the Catalyst for Change, Kymyona Burk 1D: Morphemes are Mesmerizing! Deborah Glaser 2A: Calling...
Description: This practice guide provides four evidence-based recommendations that teachers can use to deliver reading intervention to meet the needs of their students.
Description: This practice guide provides four recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Each recommendation includes implementation steps and solutions for common obstacles. The recommendations also summarize and rate supporting evidence. This guide is geared towards teachers, administrators, and other educators who want to improve their students’ foundational reading skills, and is a companion to the practice guide, Improving Reading...
Description: This practice guide provides four recommendations that address what works for English learners during reading and content area instruction. Each recommendation includes extensive examples of activities that can be used to support students as they build the language and literacy skills needed to be successful in school, including examples of how the recommendations align with Common Core and other contemporary state standards. The recommendations also summarize and rate supporting evidence. This...
Description: The recordings include the opening, closing and concurrent sessions for: Day 1- Building Multi-Tiered Systems on a Foundation of Equity, Day 2- Ensuring Inclusive Practices for Students with Disabilities and Day 3- Effective Instruction Based in the Science of Reading. On Day 3, Dr. Sylvia Linan-Thompson models how to infuse language rich activities to promote literacy.
Description: This site includes the recordings of the Keynote: Transforming the Family Tree Through Literacy by Tracy Weeden as well as 6 other presentations. Check out: 1B: Structured Literacy Instruction for Tier 1 by Louise Spear-Swerling 2A: Reading Fluency: Essential Reading Comprehension by Jan Hasbrouck 2B: Choosing and Learning Decodable Text by Wiley Blevins
Description: This tool is designed to help guide parents, caregivers, and professionals in recording the presence of important reading, writing, and language skills in Kindergarten through 5th grade. It is important to note this tool is not intended to be used as a formal screener or diagnostic tool for learning disabilities, including risk for dyslexia. This tool will provide a list of personalized resources and not a score or percentile rank.
Description: The Frayer Model is a strategy that uses a graphic organizer for vocabulary building. This technique requires students to (1) define the target vocabulary words or concepts, and (2) apply this information by generating examples and non-examples. This information is placed on a chart that is divided into four sections to provide a visual representation for students.
Description: A word map is a visual organizer that promotes vocabulary development. Using a graphic organizer, students think about terms or concepts in several ways. Most word map organizers engage students in developing a definition, synonyms, antonyms, and a picture for a given vocabulary word or concept. Enhancing students' vocabulary is important to developing their reading comprehension.
Description: Teaching vocabulary is complex. What words are important for a child to know and in what context? In this excerpt from Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, the authors consider what principles might be used for selecting which words to explicitly teach.
Description: This article by Joan Sedita explains why vocabulary instruction is an essential piece of reading instruction and outlines strategies that teachers can use to boost vocabulary instruction in their settings.
Description: These are games that address morphology instruction.
Description: Familiarity with Greek and Latin roots, as well as prefixes and suffixes, can help students understand the meaning of new words.
Description: This is a collection of resources for teaching morphology using a morpheme tree.
Description: Growing Words is an instructional resource for K -5 teachers. Extensive research shows that understanding common prefixes and suffixes, and how they combine with basewords and roots will make students more effective readers, writers and spellers, while also significantly expanding a student’s vocabulary. In this guide, the K –3 component focuses on common prefixes and suffixes and how adding these word parts to base words changes the...
Description: Multisyllabic words can stymie struggling readers. Students rely on others for help or feel defeated before even trying to decode a long word. Giving students a strategy for figuring out multisyllabic words promotes fluency and independent reading. This article explains how to chunk words according to six syllable types. Students learn clues to determine whether the vowel is long or short. When they have mastered quick and accurate recognition of the syllable types, long words can be decoded in...
Description: Don't make rules/generalizations the emphasis of phonics instruction. Teach only those rules/generalizations with the most utility. Emphasize applying the rules/generalizations rather than verbalizing them. Teach the rules/generalizations at a point when children can best understand and apply them. Never teach rules as absolutes.
Description: Why teach about syllables? Dividing words into parts, or "chunks" helps speed the process of decoding. Knowing the rules for syllable division can students read words more accurately and fluently. Understanding syllables can also help students learn to spell words correctly.
Description: This article discusses several key principles from research on MA (Morphological Analysis) that guided our development of a multidimensional approach to affix instruction. Next, they briefly discuss the research projects in which they refined and evaluated this approach with diverse elementary school students. They then describe the development of a list of affixes (and a similar list of Latin and Greek word roots) that provides a potential scope and sequence for affix instruction in...
Description: Founded in 2009, How Many Syllables is a privately owned company located in New York City, They are proud to be the leading syllable reference guide in the world. This website can help you determine "How Many Syllables."
Description: This video will help you earn how to use the Spot and Dot Method with a three syllable word.
Description: We want our readers to have automatic high frequency word recognition. Cognitive scientists have proven that we do not do this by storing words as visual images. Learn how phoneme/grapheme mapping can make your high frequency word instruction more valuable.
Description: Secondary Reading Instruction (Part 2) Module - This module examines some of the reasons that adolescents struggle with content-area text and overviews effective strategies teachers can use to improve the vocabulary and comprehension skills of students with a wide range of abilities and across a variety of subjects.
Description: Secondary Reading Instruction (Part 1): Teaching Vocabulary and Comprehension in the Content Areas - This module describes how teachers can incorporate vocabulary and reading comprehension skills instruction into content-area lessons and will introduce you to a variety of effective practices—including the use of graphic organizers—to help students better understand what they read (est. completion time: 1.5 hours). When you have completed the module, be sure to visit part two:...
Description: Students who read with understanding at an early age gain access to a broader range of texts, knowledge, and educational opportunities, making early reading comprehension instruction particularly critical. This guide recommends five specific steps that teachers, reading coaches, and principals can take to successfully improve reading comprehension for young readers.
Description: Help your students classify ideas and communicate more effectively with these free graphic organizer templates, available for download. They can be used to structure writing projects and help in problem solving, decision making, studying, planning research, and brainstorming.
Description: This site has a wide variety of graphic organizers that you can download for free from the following categories: character and story, cause and effect, central idea, close reading, cluster web, chain of events, compare and contrast, cycle of events, hierarchy, vocabulary development and miscellaneous.