Learning Words Inside and Out: Creating a SchoolWide Vocabulary Initiative

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Learning Words Inside and Out Creating a
School-Wide Vocabulary Initiative

• Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey
• San Diego State University
• Fisher, D., Frey, N. (2008). Word wise and
  content rich Five essential steps to teaching
  academic vocabulary. Portsmouth, NH Heinemann.

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How Often Has This Occurred?

• In a U.S. History class, the teacher says,Look
  up these vocabulary words and write a sentence
  using the word.
• Appeal (n) attractiveness that interests,
  pleases, or stimulates
• Shawna appeal to me from her good looks.

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Vocabulary Goes to College

• 165 college freshmen enrolled in a remedial
  reading course found that vocabulary was the only
  significant variable to make a statistically
  significant contribution to measures of literal
  and critical reading comprehension, evaluation,
  and appreciation of reading materials (Farley
  Elmore, 1992)
• Those with lower vocabulary scores were less
  likely to challenge information in passages
  (Baker, 1985)
• Less-skilled readers make limited use of context
  and over-generalize passages to try to explain
  the meaning of unknown words (McKeown, 1985)

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Learning Vocabulary?

• Both high- and low-achieving college freshmen
  readers
• Used only rote memorization to learn vocabulary
• Didnt see why it was necessary
• Scored poorly on using vocabulary in writing
  (Francis Simpson, 2003)

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The Numbers Game

• Need to know 88,500 word families by ninth grade
  (Nagy Anderson, 1984)
• 500,000 words TOO MANY! Lets cut it in half
• 250,000 words ? 1620 days (K-8, never absent)
• 154 words per day! How are you doing?

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Barriers to Vocabulary Development in Secondary

• Schedules require conceptual shifts every 50-90
  minutes
• 4-8 teachers a day who use different methods and
  devote different amounts of time to vocabulary
• Schools that operate within, but not across
  departments
• Content area teachers who know their vocabulary,
  but not effective ways to develop it
• Belief that vocabulary is the English
  departments job

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An Intentional Vocabulary Initiative

• Make it intentional through word selection and
  intentional instruction.
• Make it transparent through teacher modeling of
  word-solving and word learning.
• Make it useable with collaborative learning.
• Make it personal by fostering student ownership.
• Make it a priority with schoolwide practices.
• Fisher, D., Frey, N. (2008). Word wise and
  content rich Five essential steps to teaching
  academic vocabulary. Portsmouth, NH Heinemann.

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Step 1 Make it Intentional Selecting Words
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Influence of Background Knowledge

• Catherine the Great, a minor aristocrat from
  Germany, became Empress of Russia when her
  husband Peter, the grandson of Peter the Great,
  was killed.

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Types of Vocabulary

• Tier 1/General
• Commonplace learned from interactions with texts
  and people
• Tier 2/Specialized
• Change meaning with context (polysemic)
• Tier 3/Technical
• Specific to the discipline
• A starting point for selecting vocabulary

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The Problem Too Many Words!

• 17 words identified in 2 paragraphs
• Ideal is 8-10 a week for deep teaching (Scott,
  Jamieson-Noel, and Asselin, 2003)
• Must be narrowed, but how?

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Questions for Selecting Vocabulary

• Representative
• Repeatability
• Transportable
• Contextual Analysis
• Structural Analysis
• Cognitive Load

• Is it critical to understanding?
• Will it be used again?
• Is it needed for discussions or writing?
• Can they use context to figure it out?
• Can they use structure?
• Have I exceeded the number they can learn?

Adapted from Graves, 2006 Nagy, 1988 Marzano
Pickering, 2005
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Using Word Lists to Identify Vocabulary

• Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000)
• 570 headwords from textbooks
• Ogdens Basic English Word List
• Dreamed of a universal language
• 850 phonetically regular words
• Word Part Lists
• Focus on prefixes, derivations
• Do you know what saggital means? How do you know?

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Step 2 Make it Transparent Modeling
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Teacher Modeling

• Brief (5-10 minutes) think-alouds
• Identify unfamiliar words to learn procedures for
  discerning meaning
• Show students how to look inside (morphology and
  structure) and outside (context clues and
  resources) words

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Morphology and Word Parts

• Affixes
• Root words
• Derivations
• Cognates for English learners
• Beware of false cognates! (embarrassed/embarazada)

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But Context Isnt Always Enough

• The documentary film March of the Penguins was a
  surprise hit in 2005. However, the movie
  neglected to point out that the population of
  emperor penguins is thinning.
• Since the 1970s, the penguins neighborhood has
  become increasingly warm. The Southern Ocean
  experiences natural shifts in weather from one
  decade to the next, but this warm spell has
  continued, causing the thinning of sea ice. Less
  sea ice means fewer krill, the penguins main
  food source. Also, the weakened ice is more
  likely to break apart and drift out to sea,
  carrying off the young penguin chicks, who often
  drown.
• Is global warming responsibility for the thinning
  of penguin population? Scientists believe so.
  (Gore, 2007, p. 94)
• Think aloud to clear up confusions about skinny
  penguins!

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Resources

• Peer resources from productive group work
• Dictionaries
• Bookmark Internet resources
• Model how you use these (Phone a Friend,
  dictionary use on doc camera)

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Step 3 Make it Useable Collaborating with Peers
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Oral Language and Vocabulary

• Teacher talk dominates most classrooms (Cazden,
  2001)
• Middle school math students taught to use
  heuristic vocabulary in discussions achieved a
  higher levels (Koichu, Berman, Moore, 2007)
• High school world language students who
  constructed word maps with peers acquired more
  vocabulary (Morin Goebel, 2001)

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Tips for Productive Group Work

• Establish purpose (content, language, and social
  goals)
• Variety is the spice of life
• Integrate activities into content flow

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Fostering Collaboration

• Partner and small-group discussions
• Jigsaws
• Student think-alouds
• Reciprocal teaching
• Co-constructed graphic organizers
• Semantic feature analysis

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Step 4 Make it Personal Individual Activities
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Challenges to Independent Work

• 28 of high school teachers often or very often
  run out of time in class and assign the content
  for homework (MetLife, 2008)
• Should follow modeling, guided practice, and
  collaborative work with peers (Fisher Frey,
  2008)

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Independent Learning of Vocabulary

• Integration of schema with a focus on sets of
  relationships
• Repetition through repeated opportunities to
  encounter words in speech, reading, and writing
• Meaningful use of the words in authentic events
  (Nagy, 1988)

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Step 5 Make it a Priority Creating a
Schoolwide Focus
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Why Go Schoolwide?

• Schoolwide focus is one of the most important
  actions a middle or high school can take to
  improve achievement (Langer, 2001 Reeves, 2000)
• Focus on literacy schoolwide leads to long-term
  improvement in climate, achievement (Fisher,
  Frey, Williams, 2002)

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Two Schoolwide Initiatives

• Words of the Week (WOW Words) to focus on SAT
  words
• Wide reading to build background, increase
  exposure, and foster interest in reading

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Words of the Week

• Five words a week (Fid, Fi to trust)
• Affidavit, confidant, defiant, fidelity, infidel
• Grouped by affix or derivation
• Departments propose words
• Goal is to build vocabulary and teach patterns
  for unfamiliar words
• Introduced in English classes

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Incidental Learning Through Wide Reading

• Cumulative effect of reading 60 minutes per day
  x 5 days a week 2,250,000 words per year
• 2,250 words learned per year this way (Mason,
  Stahl, Au, Herman, 2003)
• A bargain, considering that only 300-500 words
  can be directly taught each year

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Who benefits? How?

• Text must be at independent level (you cant
  learn from books you cant read)
• Older readers learn more words than younger
  readers
• Stronger readers learn more words than struggling
  readers
• The words they are likely to learn are those they
  know a little bit about

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8 Factors for SSR

• Access
• Appeal
• Environment
• Encouragement
• Staff training
• Non-accountability
• Follow-up activities
• Distributed time to read
• Pilgreen, J. (2000). The sustained silent reading
  handbook. Portsmouth, NH Heinemann

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Independent Reading in Content Classes

• Choice
• Relevance
• Differentiation

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Lessons Learned Professional Growth
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Sustaining the Effort

• Learn with and from colleagues
• Develop a professional library on vocabulary
  development
• Ensure that classrooms have a a range of resources

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Learning Words Inside and Outside

• When our teaching is at its best, our students
  take what theyve learned inside our classrooms
  to their outside lives. Vocabulary doesnt exist
  between the school bellsit is carried with each
  learner for the rest of their lives.