Learning Log 5
Vocabulary is crucial to the success of our students, because words are labels for everything and they are critical for understanding sentences and passages. Chapter seven in a nutshell, "explores what it means to know a word, how vocabulary develops, how many and what types of words are important for learning..." (page 170). Because reports show that students' vocabulary scores are on the decline, probably due to such an overreliance on technology and the need to use words most efficiently in the form of acronyms and the such, teachers must take on the challenge to reinvigorate the students interest in vocabulary. This in turn will increase comprehension and knowledge.
As stated on page 170: "Word knowledge is not static, but rather dynamic-changing and growing over time as a learner experiences, hears, and reads a word in a variety of places and circumstance." I like how the chapter equates word knowledge to the process of getting to know a person; first as a stranger, than an acquaintance and once depth of understanding has been reached: a friend. It becomes clear that a student learns vocabulary through repeated exposure, and that takes time.
Word knowledge also results from both incidental (experiences that develop naturally) and intentional learning experiences (experiences that are better developed via strategy and instruction). Incidental vocabulary can be developed by word games, classroom discussion, role play, storytelling, getting exposure to a variety of spoken word, conversing and reading. Students from less affluent homes, or homes where English is not spoken, need teachers to help fill the gap in their exposure to words by providing these experiences in the classroom. Intentional experiences can come in the form of direct instruction, with activities like think-aloud, modeling and opportunities to practice in order to help clarify. Interactive strategies, which include semantic maps, semantic feature analysis and word sorts are also effective strategies to create intentional experiences. Lastly, vocabulary instruction needs to be before, during and after the lesson in order to provide the needed exposure. I think providing incidental experiences sounds a lot more fun than the other one, but both types of experiences are needed for vocabulary development.
Content-specific vocabulary, terms that are critical to a specific discipline, and academic vocabulary, words that are commonly found in many expository texts, formal presentations and speeches, are the two types of vocabulary that are important in instruction. The book states that content-specific vocabulary should often be introduced in the preparation portion of the lesson, because of those words hold a lot of meaning in the lesson. There are also a lot of words in the English language that have multiple meanings depending on the context, such as the example from the Calvin and Hobbes comic, so its best to clear up confusion ahead of time.
I don't quite understand the paragraph on page 170 about AWL. I'm not sure what morphological families are, the Academic Corpus, or Spanish-English cognates. But, nevertheless, according to the textbook, attending to AWL, or the Academic Word List of the most commonly found word families, during instruction can increase the learning potential of English Language Learners as well as other struggling learners, especially those from lower income families.
It's obvious that making students do rote vocabulary exercises doesn't give them the experience, exposure and engagement they need to gain full-concept learning of the words. This type of learning requires four mental operations, according to page 173:
1. recognizing and generating critical attributes
2. seeing relationships between the concept to be learned and what is already known (such as with the brainstorming exercise)
3. applying the concept to a variety of contexts
4. generating new contexts for the learned concept (such as by creating new sentences using previously learned concepts, like in paired-word sentence generation)
No comments:
Post a Comment