This is the third post in our series on teaching vocabulary. If you’re new here, we suggest you begin by reading the previous posts in this series, click here for the introduction to the series and here to read about explicitly teaching new vocabulary words. Each post will focus on building inclusive, culturally responsive practices around one aspect of Micheal Graves’ Four Principles of Effective Vocabulary Instruction (The Vocabulary Book: Learning and Instruction 2005). Why do varied and rich vocabulary experiences matter so much for students? While explicit instruction about high-leverage vocabulary words is a powerful practice for bolstering vocabulary knowledge, incidental learning is actually how we learn most new words throughout our lives. Research has found that the average learner enters kindergarten with 5000-10000 words in their vocabulary and leaves high school with around 50,000 (Nagy and Herman, 1987). Divided over 180 instructional days each year, that's around 17-20 words per day—certainly more than could be effectively and efficiently taught through explicit instruction. Children’s brains are naturally wired for language learning (Moats and Tolman, 2009; Wolf, 2008), and typically, creating environments full of rich and varied vocabulary centers around considering two larger areas for children to learn lots of new words: exposure to rich conversation (Nagy and Anderson, 1984; Sternberg, 1987) and exposure to reading increasingly sophisticated texts (Stanovich, 1986). Language is not only a powerful tool through which we experience and participate in the world, but is also deeply connected to cultural identity. Thoughtfully curating a vocabulary environment can be a form of cultural affirmation and can frame students’ preexisting language knowledge as an asset, not an obstacle. Additionally, being strategic about the vocabulary that surrounds students each day allows us to embed support for all of our children’s development of their vocabularies and language skills, including multilingual learners. Giving opportunities for multiple exposures to new words through a variety of instructional activities and discussions can facilitate stronger retention and deepening of vocabulary knowledge for students learning a new language (Cardenas-Hagan, 2020).
Four Tips for Creating Rich Vocabulary Experiences in the Classroom:
Use complex and varied language across the day. For younger students who may not yet be reading complex texts on their own, the words they hear from adults provide one of their main venues for hearing and learning new and interesting words. Consider ways to change your everyday talk with students to include more varied language. For example, you might say, “Will you proceed briskly to the line?” instead of, “It’s time to line up.” One way to think about this is by identifying common phrases you say and asking yourself, “How else could I say that?” You might also invite students and/or families to share how they say some of these everyday directives and relate those vocabulary experiences to your classroom activities. For example, if Mirae’s sister constantly tells her “aprúrate” when they are running late, that could become a part of the class language community as well. Additionally, you’ll want to be particularly thoughtful about the language you use during instruction. Many curriculums already contain rich language. If you notice that some students do not understand some of the vocabulary used in your curriculum, stick to a quick synonym rather than reword the content. For example, if a lesson says, “Think about the character’s perspective.” You might add, “Perspective means a particular attitude toward something.” Begin embedding new and content-specific vocabulary early, so students have many opportunities to hear new language used in context before they encounter the words on their own.
Foster a linguistically affirming community of vocabulary learning. All of your learners enter classrooms with a particularly rich range of vocabulary knowledge that goes across languages (Martinez, 2018). They also each bring unique vocabularies rooted in cultural experiences based both inside and outside of school. Recognizing and leveraging the range of vocabulary knowledge in your classroom will bolster the growth of your students and allow for a richer language environment for all your learners, including your multilingual students. Research shows that having a large vocabulary in any language positively impacts children’s ability to use vocabulary in more precise and varied ways, such as interpreting metaphors or understanding connections between complex words (Genesee, 2015). In the classroom, you can create space for children to draw on their full linguistic repertoire as they learn new words by encouraging students to engage in discussions using any language they prefer. For example, two students might discuss an idea about a text together in Urdu before sharing that idea in English with the whole class community. Invite children to teach each other new words for shared classroom or curricular experiences in a variety of languages and help them to attend particularly to cognates between languages. For example, during a butterfly life cycle lesson students might learn that the word metamorfosis in Spanish is very similar to the word metamorphosis in English. Additionally, it may be informative and interesting for all children to better understand why and how cognates tend to develop. Discussing morphology and etymology (a topic we’ll address in the next post of this series) can help students understand that words like survive (in English), survivre (in French), sopravvivere (in Italian), and sobreviver (in Spanish) all share a similar Latin root, vivire, meaning “to live.”
Create regular opportunities for talk. Meaningful vocabulary learning requires opportunities for children to use as well as hear words. Laufer and Nation (2012) found that “researchers seem to agree with ten exposures, there is some chance of recognizing the meaning of a new word later on” (p. 167). Other researchers have pointed to a range of numbers of exposures from 6-20 (Uchihara et al., 2012). While the number of exposures is a ballpark estimate, the larger point is that kids need to hear and interact with words many times before they become integrated into their vocabularies. Regular conversation allows children to naturally pick up new vocabulary through context and usage as well as to use newly acquired vocabulary for practical purposes. For multilingual children, this can also create opportunities for strategic language development, particularly if children have the opportunity to converse using any and all languages they know. Muthyala Udaya’s research indicates that gains in vocabulary in any language can support learning new vocabulary in a new language (2019). When creating additional opportunities for talk, consider the needs of your students. If your kids need to build more temporal vocabulary (first, next, suddenly, finally, etc…) and better understand shades of emotion (such as happy, joyful, elated), you might set aside more time to tell stories, to hear stories told, or to discuss their observations and the events of the day. Students will also benefit from time to play dramatically. As students are talking across the day, look for ways to extend their use of language. You might coach them to speak in more complex sentences, introduce content-specific or topic-specific language to help them discuss their ideas, or suggest a new vocabulary word that captures what they’re discussing. For example, consider an exchange we recently observed in a Kindergarten classroom during “choice time” while a group of students played with toy farm animals in the blocks center. The class has been learning about farms in a recent literacy unit. Teacher: What are you building? Austin: A place with the animals. The cow goes here. Samara: and the sheep. Teacher: I see you put the cow and the sheep together inside the building. Is this building the barn? Samara: Yep. The barn. It’s the barn. Teacher: I see, you put the sheep and cows inside the barn. That will keep them safe on your farm. This conversation continued, but even inside this quick back-and-forth exchange, the teacher was able to affirm the work the children had done to build a barn and discuss two of the animals they had learned about, reinforce the vocabulary word barn, and work on the prepositional phrase inside.
Preserve time for wide independent reading and read aloud to children across the day. Books are a particularly rich resource for children to encounter and learn new words. Printed text generally contains more low-frequency words than speech (Cunningham, 2005). In one analysis of the number of rare words in texts, researchers noted that even simple children’s books such as Goodnight Moon contain 1.72 times more unique words than a typical conversation between adults and children (Montag et al., 2016). Additional research shows that different types of texts are likely to contain different types of words (Hiebert, 2020) with information texts typically containing a wider range of rare, context-dependent Tier 3 words, and narrative texts often containing many Tier 2 words that are relevant to characters' feelings, traits, settings, and problems. To maximize the benefit of all those beautiful new words that kids will encounter, you’ll want to read aloud often and preserve ample time for independent reading across genres. Read-aloud time in particular can create space for both implicit and explicit vocabulary work, as you’ll likely teach some new words in a text as target words (for more ideas on this check out our earlier post on explicitly teaching new vocabulary) while other words kids will experience through simple exposure
As with all vocabulary practices, you’ll want to be thoughtful about how your own linguistic experiences and biases might shape the vocabulary environment in your classroom and be particularly thoughtful about how children are exposed to vocabulary. When planning any vocabulary experience, whether it's reading aloud, curating texts for your classroom library or play experiences for choice time, coaching children as they talk, or even selecting topics for children to talk about during morning meeting, you might consider the following lenses:
How can I set myself up to continuously learn about my students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds and vocabulary practices?
How might our current language practices include or exclude students? How might I move our class language routines and practices toward more inclusivity?
How might my own linguistic biases impact how I coach students on their vocabulary usage and talk?
References
Cárdenas-Hagan, Elsa. Literacy Foundations for English Learners: A Comprehensive Guide to Evidence-Based Instruction. Brookes Publishing, 2020.
Cunningham A. (2005). Vocabulary growth through independent reading and reading aloud to children. In Kamil M., & Hiebert E. (Eds.), Teaching and learning new vocabulary: Bringing research to practice (pp. 45–68). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [Google Scholar]
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Graves, Michael F. The Vocabulary Book: Learning and Instruction. Second edition, Teachers College Press, 2016.
Hiebert, Elfrieda H. Teaching Words and How They Work: Small Changes for Big Vocabulary Results. Teachers College Press : Scholastic Inc., 2020.
Laufer, B. & Nation, I.S.P. 2012. Vocabulary. In Gass, S.M. & Mackey, A. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp.163 – 176). Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge
Martínez, Ramón Antonio. “Beyond the English Learner Label: Recognizing the Richness of Bi/Multilingual Students’ Linguistic Repertoires.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 71, no. 5, 2018, pp. 515–22, https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1679.
Moats, L, & Tolman, C (2009). Excerpted from Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS): The Speech Sounds of English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Phoneme Awareness (Module 2). Boston: Sopris West.
Montag, Jessica L., et al. “The Words Children Hear: Picture Books and the Statistics for Language Learning.” Psychological Science, vol. 26, no. 9, 2015, pp. 1489–96, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615594361.
Nagy, W.E. and Anderson, R.C. (1984) How Many Words Are There in Printed School English. Reading Research Quarterly, 19, 304-330, http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/747823.
Nagy, W. E., & Herman, P. A. (1987). Breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge: Implications for acquisition and instruction. In M. G. McKeown & M. E. Curtis (Eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition (pp. 19–35). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Stanovich, Keith E. “Matthew Effects in Reading: Some Consequences of Individual Differences in the Acquisition of Literacy.” Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 4, 1986, pp. 360–407, https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.21.4.1.
Sternberg, R. J. (1987). Most vocabulary is learned from context. In M. G. McKeown & M. E. Curtis (Eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition (pp. 89–105). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Uchihara, Takumi, et al. “The Effects of Repetition on Incidental Vocabulary Learning: A Meta‐Analysis of Correlational Studies.” Language Learning, vol. 69, no. 3, 2019, pp. 559–99, https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12343.
Udaya, Muthyala. “USE OF L1 IN ENHANCING L2 VOCABULARY.” European Journal of English Language Teaching, 4 (4), Feb. 2019, https://doi.org/10.46827/ejel.v0i0.4154.
Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.