Vocabulary Instruction & Teaching Strategies – Getting Started with SoR

Vocabulary is a significant predictor of overall reading comprehension and student performance, even as young as kindergarten. Vocabulary instruction often has taken a backseat to phonics/decoding or comprehension. But, it is an important component of literacy and should have its place in our classrooms.

A lot of our students’ word knowledge and vocabulary is learned without our explicit instruction. They’re learned implicitly through incidental learning. They learn words from oral language, media, and reading and hearing texts. But, we also need to teach our students how to use strategies to find the meaning of unknown words, and specific vocabulary words to enhance their learning. We need to explicitly teach them words, especially those that are less concrete, less common, and words that aren’t present outside of academics to continue to support their learning.

In the last post in our series, The 3 Tiers of Vocabulary, we walked through each of the tiers of vocabulary and what words belong in each tier. We also took things a step further and discussed how you refine your list to identify which words to teach. Now, we’ll explore how to teach our chosen vocabulary words as well as how to teach students to find the meaning of words on their own.

How to Teach Vocabulary Words

Once you have a list of words to teach, your next step is instruction. It can take 10-12 exposures for students to truly know and take ownership of a word. Students need to experience and actually use the word to have true ownership of it. Notice none of the steps below include looking up the word in a dictionary and writing the word in sentences. While both of those things are okay, they don’t necessarily promote true ownership of the word. They are fine as one component or learning a word, but shouldn’t be the extent of our instruction.

The NRP concluded that there is no single research-based method for teaching vocabulary. Rather, a variety of direct and indirect methods, beyond just knowledge of the definitions, promotes vocabulary building. Engaging vocabulary instruction helps students create relationships among words and not just define them.

The steps for explicitly teaching a vocabulary word are:

1. Pronounce the word and have students repeat the word 2-3 times.
2. Walk through a morphemic analysis of the word (detailed below).
3. Explain the word’s meaning in student-friendly language.
4. Use the context of the word to deepen the meaning
5. Provide additional opportunities for experiencing the word (detailed below)

Students are not able to learn every word possible. Therefore, in addition to explicit teaching of tier 2 vocabulary words, our vocabulary instruction should also include strategies for finding the meaning of a word while reading independently, and we should model them for students. These strategies can and should include using a dictionary, morphemic analysis, and contextual analysis. For English Language Learners, instruction should also include identification of cognates. Students can learn about these strategies through your explicit instruction of tier 2 vocabulary words.

Using the Context

A great way to teach the meaning of vocabulary words is through the context present in the current text. Walking students through using the various types of context clues to determine the word’s meaning, helps them take ownership of the strategy to apply when reading independently. Seeing the word present in additional texts and contexts also helps students develop a deep understanding of the word and how it’s used. When we teach with text sets or thematic units, it’s easy to provide many exposures to specific content related vocabulary.

Students should also be taught to use context clues to determine an unknown word’s meaning. There are five categories of context clues that can be used: definition, synonym, antonym, example, and general. Knowing the categories of context clues can help students identify what is present in a text to help them find the words meaning. FCRR has a great lesson for teaching the context clues categories. Context clues do not always work, and can be difficult for students, and it’s important we model both context clues that work, and those that don’t.

Definition example: The peninsula, a piece of land that is almost entirely surrounded by water but is connected to the mainland on one side, served as a perfect place for the manatees to swim.

Synonym example: He was a very generous man who always gave his time and money to help organizations.

Antonym example: The hill was a steep incline, rather than an easy, slow rise to the top.

Example example: Florida and Alaska are both peninsulas.

General example:  Since the cat and dog quarrel so often, Jake keeps the cat in his bedroom most of the day.

Morphemic Analysis

Morphemic analysis is the process of identifying a word’s meaning by analyzing its parts, or morphemes. Those parts include base words, root words, and/or affixes (prefixes and suffixes). Not only does this help the student understand the word based on its parts, it also helps students learn the meaning of those parts. For example, when working with the word natural students can likely already connect it with nature but may not yet understand that “-al” is a commonly occurring adjective suffix. Morphemic analysis is a powerful word learning strategy, as once students can identify and know a number of roots and affixes it opens the door for understanding a large number of words.

Other Vocabulary Instruction Strategies

The following series of strategies are those that are most applicable with specific words. While contextual and morphemic analysis can be done with a wide array of words, these strategies are best used with specific types of words. For example, nouns likely work well with identifying categories, adjectives work well with shades of meaning. Choose the best strategies that are most relevant to the vocabulary word(s) you’ve chosen.

Synonyms and Antonyms

As mentioned above, it’s important for students to be able to connect a word’s meaning with words they already have in their vocabulary. Once the word has been identified and defined, students should be able to identify synonyms and antonyms for the word. The words can be compared to the synonyms and antonyms, especially if the words are somewhat nuanced. Obviously, this strategy doesn’t work with every possible vocabulary word, but it

Shades of Meaning

Semantic gradients, also sometimes called shades of meaning, is a great way to connect the meaning of a new word with previously known words. For example, you might be teaching the word “hollered” in your text. To help illustrate the specific meaning of the word, you can connect it with words like “shouted” and “yelled” and “said” while showing the variety in their meanings.

Example/Non-Example

Another powerful tool is giving examples or non-examples, especially for categorical words or those that don’t have synonyms and antonyms the kids can readily identify. For example, if you’re learning the word construct, students might give a non-example of their little sibling destroying their Lego tower.

Multiple Meanings

Many tier 2 words are multiple meanings words. It’s important to explicitly teach these meanings and help students understand them within contexts. This explanation can/should include focusing on parts of speech, when relevant, to help students see their function. Most students already have familiarity with the two most common meanings of “duck”, so that is a great word for illustrating multiple meaning words.

Other ways of Teaching Vocabulary

• Parts of Speech: This can be teacher identified, or student identified – one way is by finding the part of speech in the sentences from the text the word was taken from.
• Classification: Can this word be categorized into something larger?
• Real life examples
• Images
• Acting it out
• Games

It’s important to note that the purpose of our vocabulary instruction is to help students take ownership of the vocabulary words we’re teaching. To that end, many of these activities should be student driven. After we’ve introduced the meaning of a word, students should restate it in their own words. Rather than just showing real-life images, have students draw or illustrate them. Students can generate synonyms and antonyms or examples and non-examples. While it may be helpful to have ideas ready should students struggle to identify appropriate ones, that should be a backup, rather than the purpose. If we want students to know and understand words for their long-term use, we need to give students immediate opportunities to use the word.

Wide reading

As mentioned in the first paragraph, many words are learned without explicit instruction. Students can build their vocabulary incidentally by engaging in high-quality oral language experiences both in school and at home, as well as through reading a wide range of texts. These texts can be read aloud or read independently. Extensive reading gives students exposures to words in a variety of contexts and often provides multiple exposures. The benefit of students’ breadth of reading, once able to read fluently, cannot be overstated.

The next post in the series will feature the Frayer Model of vocabulary instruction.

Further Information on Vocabulary Instruction

Content Area Vocabulary Learning by Douglas Fisher & Nancy Frey on Reading Rockets

Four Practical Principles for Enhancing Vocabulary Instruction by Manyak, Von Gunten, Autenrieth, Gillis, and Mastre-O’Farrell on Reading Rockets

Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction by Beck, McKeown, & Kucan (book) on Amazon (affiliate link)

Five Key Principles for Effective Vocabulary Instruction by Tim Shanahan on Reading Rockets

Which Words Do I Teach and How? by David Liben from Student Achievement Partners on Achieve the Core

Teaching Vocabulary by Linda Diamond & Linda Gutlohn on Reading Rockets

Further Information on the Science of Reading

I am sharing helpful information on the Science of Reading throughout this blog series. Each post has a different focus and includes links to relevant posts of my own, from time to time. The topics have been carefully chosen to include the background information needed to understand the science and help you learn more about some of the large, underlying research in the field. The first three up in the series include The National Reading Panel’s 5 Pillars of Reading, the Simple View of Reading, and Scarborough’s Rope.

Want to get each post in your email so you don’t miss it? Sign up below. I will email you the posts, beginning with the first ones in the series, and continuing with each post throughout.