This post is courtesy of Dr. Michael Graves, Professor Emeritus of Literacy Education at the University of Minnesota. As a researcher, Mike has examined--and continues to examine--variables related to vocabulary development and instruction. His most recent books on vocabulary are written for teachers as well as researchers, including Teaching Individual Words: One Size Does Not Fit All (2009), and The Vocabulary Book (2006). To read about Mike's comprehensive plan for vocabulary instruction, detailed fully in The Vocabulary Book, see my post: Four Ply Vocabulary Plan.
Vocabulary has been my major scholarly interest for something like 30 years, and over that period of time we have learned a huge amount about teaching vocabulary (see, for example, Baumann, Kameénui, & Ash, 2000; Blachowicz & Fisher, 2000; Graves & Silverman, in press). Most of what we have learned, however, is about teaching reading vocabulary. Recently, we have come to recognize that some students come to school with very small oral vocabularies (Hart & Risley, 1995, 2001). While most students arrive at school with oral vocabularies of perhaps 10,000 words, some English learners and some children of poverty arrive knowing just a fraction of that number of words. Building oral vocabulary in students who enter school with very small oral vocabularies is tremendously important and vital to their becoming successful readers (Biemiller, 2009, DeTemple & Snow, 2004; Graves, 2009).
Two key questions we face in helping these children are "How do we teach them oral vocabulary? and "Which words do we teach them?" In this blog, I address each of these in turn.
How Do We Teach Oral Vocabulary to Primary-Grade Students with Very Small Vocabularies?
Both observations of mothers reading to their young children and studies with preschool and primary grade students have repeatedly revealed a successful pattern of reading aloud and build oral vocabulary that goes by the name of interactive oral reading or shared book reading (DeTemple & Snow, 2004). There are several versions of the technique, but one of the best documented is that described by Biemiller (2009). It consists of selecting a number of short books, each of which contain 20 or so words that are not likely to be in your students' oral vocabularies, and working with each book over a five day cycle like this one.
Both observations of mothers reading to their young children and studies with preschool and primary grade students have repeatedly revealed a successful pattern of reading aloud and build oral vocabulary that goes by the name of interactive oral reading or shared book reading (DeTemple & Snow, 2004). There are several versions of the technique, but one of the best documented is that described by Biemiller (2009). It consists of selecting a number of short books, each of which contain 20 or so words that are not likely to be in your students' oral vocabularies, and working with each book over a five day cycle like this one.
- On day one, probably a Monday, read the book once without stopping to define any words.
- On days two-four, read it three more times, each time briefly defining about six unknown words as they come up in the reading so that over the three days you define about 20 words.
- On the fifth day, review each of the 20 or so words taught in a different context but with the same meaning.
As Biemiller notes and as I would emphasize, because these children need to add a large number of words to their oral vocabularies, this is a long term process, extending over several years for many students.
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| Mike Graves, Pa ai Beach |
Which Words Should We Teach Primary-Grade Students with Very Small Oral Vocabularies?
Here, I consider two different groups of students and suggest a different source of words for each of these two. The first group is students with extremely small oral vocabularies, probably fewer than 2,000 words. There are not many of these students in a single classroom, probably only 2-4 of them even in a class with quite a few newcomers and children of poverty. However, those students who do fall into this group desperately need our help. The most important words for these students to learn are those that occur most frequently, those that they will stumble across repeatedly as they are reading if they don't know them.
My colleague Greg Sales and I (Sales & Graves, 2009) have identified a set of about 4,000 words that we term The First 4,000 Words and created a web-based program to teach them. These words make up about 80 percent of the words in a typical text. This list, which ranks the words by frequency, and a description of the web-based program for teaching them are available at thefirst4000words.com. The list is in pdf format and available for download. To give you an idea of the words the list contains, the five most frequent words on it are the, of, and, to, and a; five middle-frequency words on it are file, boots, reflect, custom, and background; and the five least frequent words on it are abuse, loving, generous, excessive, and arteries. As I just said, you are likely to have very few students in your class that don't already know these words, but for students who do not already know them learning them is crucial.
The second group of students who need special help with oral vocabulary consists of students who already know most of The First 4,000 Words but whose oral vocabularies are still far smaller than those of average students. This is a considerably larger number of students, and if you teach a class that includes a number of newcomers and children of poverty a significant number of students in your class may fall into this group. Fortunately, Biemiller (2009) has developed a list of words specifically designed for building oral vocabulary in these students. It is called Words Worth Teaching in Grades K-2 and includes about 2,000 words, most of which are less frequent than those on The First 4,000 Words. Some of the words from this list, which is not sequenced by importance or frequency, are absorb, against, laboratory, language, stumble, and study. The complete list is available in Biemiller (2009).
In summary, the main message here is that while most students come to school with large oral vocabularies, other students—some English learners and some children of poverty—come with very small oral vocabularies, and these students need special help. A technique called Interactive Oral Reading has been shown to be an effective teaching tool, and Sales and Graves (2009) The First 4,000 Words and Biemiller's (2009) Words Worth Teaching in Grades K-2 provide appropriate words to teach.
I look forward to your comments and suggestions.
Mike Graves
- Baumann, J. F., Kame'enui, E. J., & Ash, G. E. (2003). Research on vocabulary instructing: Voltaire redux. In J. Flood, D. Lapp, J. R. Squire, & J. M. Jensen (Eds.), Handbook on research on teaching the English language arts (2nd ed., pp. 752-785. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Biemiller, A. (2009). Words worth teaching. Columbus, OH: SRA/McGraw-Hill.
- Blachowicz, C., & Fisher, P. (2000). Vocabulary. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P. D. Pearson (Eds.), The handbook of reading research, Vol. III. New York: Longman.
- De Temple, J., & Snow, C. E. (2004). Learning words from books. In A. van Kleeck, S. A. Stahl, and E. B. Bauer (Eds.), On reading books to children (pp. 16-36). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Graves, M. F. (2009). Teaching individual words: One size does not fit all. New York: Teachers College Press and IRA.
- Graves, M. F., & Silverman, R. (in press). Interventions to enhance vocabulary development. In R. Allington & A. McGill-Franzen (Eds.), Handbook of reading disabilities research. Mahwah, NY: Erlbaum.
- Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (2003, Spring). The early catastrophe: The 30 million word gap. American Educator, 27 (1), 4-9.
- Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experiences of young American children. Baltimore: P. H. Brookes.
- Sales, G. C., & Graves, M. F. (2009). Web-based pedagogy for fostering literacy by teaching basic vocabulary. Information Technology, Education and Society, 9 (2). 5-30.
