Getting Your Game On With Vocabulary

This week we begin to integrate our initial understandings of prior knowledge with the development of  content vocabulary. One of the first things you may notice in Alvermann et al is their emphasis on the idea that language is situated. Remember this idea from Day 1 with your literacy digs? We situate our language not only within the concepts of each discipline (words like angle or point take on different values in math, politics, literature), but we also situate and make choices about language based on our point of view in each context. In some cases, as we discussed with prior knowledge last week, cultural idioms and other uses can put students at a disadvantage for inferring a useful meaning. This means that as teachers, we need to find multiple ways to broaden their experiences. We can do this through a variety of content-related texts, multiple perspectives, and give them scaffolds for each new conceptual challenge while clarifying meanings in EACH disciplinary context.

To reiterate our work last week, I have included a few Anticipation Guide statements, which we will discuss next class. Use this as potential food for thought with your readings and dialogue journals.

Using context clues is a failsafe strategy for most students.
Y/N 

The only way students learn new words is through direct instruction.
Y/N

The best kind of word knowledge is to know the definition, backwards and forwards!
Y/N

If a student can decode a word, they can make sense of it in a sentence, paragraph, or whole text.
Y/N

Most students do better if they can organize and explore their learning of a new word within a structure.  Y/N

A few more considerations--as you look over vocabulary strategies in Buehl and Alvemann, notice that Concept Mapping is further explored by Schwartz, which is our Peer-Teach article this week.  I wonder how we will all compare Schwartz's explanation to the outline provided by our other readings, and whether we will find discrepencies, confusion, or clarification?

And, as you read about the other strategies such as semantic mapping, magnet summaries, student friendly-definitions, vocabulary overview, analogy charting, which seem most appropriate to the grade level you wish to teach? Starting to prioritize these choices will help you outline your upcoming Content Inquiry Project--the next layer you'll be adding to your ML project.


Finally, what do I mean by my title, Getting Your Game On:

Although I know we will be hearing your peers present Schwartz in both classes, there are a few points in his article which are generalizable for this entire course. I'll focus on one here.  Schwartz uses game strategies as an analogy for thinking about vocabulary learning. I find this analogy productive because it reminds me of what we are trying to accomplish with modeling learning strategies. Strategies are techniques or tactics that help every reader solve comprehension-processing problems inherent in text, including knowing how to figure out unknown words, infer meanings, engage prior knowledge, etc.

Still, we know that in team sports, for example, any individual player's abilities are enhanced by the social nature of the sport. In other words, its the playing of the game, not just the memorization of terms off the smart-board, or filling in the worksheet.  Many of you brought this up last week-what is the point of an anticipation guide if you don't actually work through it with students?  For strategic readers, especially those struggling with vocabulary concepts, you need a LIVE experience with the TEAM to help you succeed as an individual player. Only the most talented and proficient players can go it alone on the field of play, and inevitably it is a less pleasurable experience for all. This is why we spend a good amount of time early in the course talking about building reading communities, with the teacher engaged as a coach in guiding her students towards active participation. Collaborative discussion, different registers of "talk" between teacher and student, working through strategy models in a live scenario, all these provide opportunities for concept-building in ways that definition worksheets do not.

PS: I highly recommend the additional BB article, "Reading mathematics: More than words can say" (Adams) for this week if anyone is planning to stick with teaching math!

GLOSSARY FOR WORD KNOWLEDGE

Degrees of Word Knowledge: a scale for assessing current student knowledge and needs for vocabulary development. There are four indicators that will help you choose strategies for further instruction: A student a) has no knowledge of word or concept; b) has heard the word but has limited sense of the concept; c) knows the concept but cannot attach it to the word; c) has an understanding of both concept and word. As part of your initial assessment of student prior knowledge as well as ongoing development of vocabulary / concepts, you'll want to return to this scale frequently.

Ways to Support Guided Release with Vocabulary / Concepts: (Alvermann)
1) construct opportunities for active participation with words (not worksheets!); 2) help students to personalize word meanings, connections; 3) immerse classroom in texts and experiences; 3) choose text-sets that allow for repeated exposure to same concept/word with a variety of genres that support visual, abstract, and concrete examples. 

Kinds of Vocabulary:  (Alvermann and Buehl)
As teachers of reading and writing in your various subject discourses, you will be responsible for exposing your students to many kinds of words and concepts, from high frequency or "sight words" commonly used in all types of print (an, an, the, to), to word families and roots of meaning (transport, transportation, portable), to procedural vocabulary like "experiment", "primary source", literary analysis" or "order of operations", to expressive vocabulary(what they use to explain or express what they know), receptive vocabulary (what they hear and understand), even cultural idioms like " a watched pot never boils", or technical vocabulary like ecolocation


Buehl breaks down the continuum between "typical" and "technical" vocabulary further in his explanation of Student Friendly Vocabulary (see pg 176).  He argues that breaking down words into Tier 1, 2, 3 help us organize the most basic words commonly found in spoken or "expressive" language, to more difficult written text (such as polysemous or multiple-meaning words) and words central to building knowledge in a particular subject, what he calls "Disciplinary Tool-kit Words".

Reading Math: (for those interested) Adams' article argues for exploration of math concepts in terms in variety of ways: definitions, multiple meanings, homophones and similar sounding words, reading passages to support problem-solving; numerals in context, symbols in context, and the relationships between words, numerals and examples (again-visual, abstract, and concrete connections).