Chapter 9 - Vocabulary

I love vocabulary! That being said, I'm not sure how I learned it. Beers gives us some great strategies to use when working with instructionally naive (thanks Christy) students. Why some teachers continue to use worksheets is beyond me. The only logical explanation is laziness. I thought it was terrific when Beers was successful in getting her group of teachers to admit that learning 20 random vocabulary words/meaning per week was too much for them, let alone their students. The exercise of making the teachers use the words throughout their instruction prior to introducing them to the students was brilliant!

I can relate to the disconnect between new words and making meaning or even remembering them in the first place. Some of my first SPED courses used language that was completely foreign to me. But now that I've heard the words, read the words, and used the words myself...I have made huge progress in making the connection to the words and their meaning and how to use them in many applications.

I liked all of the suggestions that Beers offers to us in this chapter, but there were a few that I really liked:

Lesson #2 - Context as a clue: Teaching students how to use the context as a clue requires that students see relationships among words and an make inferences about the passage (187). There are specific strategies we can teach our dependent students to help them learn how to derive clues from the text they have read: Explanation clues, synonym clues, antonym clues, gist clues.

Lesson #3 - Teach word parts: We must also help dependent readers increase their word knowledge by teaching them how words work (188).  Not surprisingly, when we successfully teach students the meanings of prefixes, roots, and suffixes, they can unlock the definitions of many words.

Lesson #5 - Graphic Organizers: Graphic organizers help dependent readers organize information and see relationships that they otherwise might not see (194). The point of this lesson was to take dictionary definitions and make them real life for the students. Again, teaching students to make a connection to what they are learning increases the student's ability to generalize the information.

There are more, but now I'm rambling. In closing "Words matter, but how teachers help students learn words and learn about words matters more" (203).