Why should you improve your students’ vocabulary? Well, it is an important component of improving your students’ reading comprehension, and it is essential to comprehend the subject content. Furthermore, word knowledge is strongly linked to academic success. Those reasons alone should suffice. But in addition to that, as a life skill, researchers say that it is one of the best predictors of career success, and it is linked to everything from intelligence to wealth. But for now, let’s focus on the how. How do we improve our students’ vocabulary? Let’s break the answer to that question into two categories:
1. Teachers Must Take Action: Teachers must use at least a few systems, routines, techniques, skills, and strategies. Additionally, teachers may wish to supplement with curriculums, lessons, and possibly a few worksheets. Many of our curriculums already contain some vocabulary instruction, and teachers must maximize those lessons by bringing them to life and by making them real and relevant.
2. Teachers Must Understand What Works and Understand What They Are Doing: Teachers must take action in a way that gets results. They must understand and have purpose in everything they do. Teachers must have an overall framework and methodology, along with goals and objectives. Finally, teachers must use their time wisely.
Keep these two categories in mind as we move forward. My goal here is to help teachers understand how to take action in a way that gets results. To achieve this goal, we will explore ten topics.
1. Creating Vocabulary Synergy Across the Curriculum
2. Isolated Skill Drills Don’t Work
3. Incidental vs. Intentional Vocabulary Acquisition
4. Is Reading Alone Enough?
5. Vocabulary Acquisition for English Language Learners
6. Effective Vocabulary Instruction #1: Five Guiding Principles
7. Effective Vocabulary Instruction #2: Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary
8. Effective Vocabulary Instruction #3: The Four Essential Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction
9. How Much Time Does Effective Vocabulary Instruction Take?
10. How Exactly Do I Teach Vocabulary?
11. How Should Teachers Select Vocabulary Words to Teach?
Let’s begin!
Creating Vocabulary Synergy Across the Curriculum
Before you hand out that next worksheet, ask yourself this question: “How do students acquire vocabulary?” When you understand the answer to that question, you may choose not to hand out the worksheet.
Whatever actions you take to improve your students’ vocabulary, you will be more effective if you understand how it relates to and connects to reading, writing, grammar, and the rest of the subject content across the curriculum. The best vocabulary teachers understand what they are doing, they have a passion for vocabulary, and they harness this understanding and passion to create synergy across the curriculum.
After reading what follows, you will have a wealth of valuable new knowledge on vocabulary instruction, and this will help you to choose the best tools and design the best systems and routines in order to be a highly effective and efficient vocabulary teacher across the curriculum.
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Isolated Skill Drills Don’t Work
The reality is that we can’t teach our students all of the words that they need to learn each year one by one. There just aren’t enough hours in the school day. In fact, in Effective Vocabulary Instruction for English-Language Learners (2006), Graves and Fitzgerald say, “Children learn most of their vocabulary from reading (Sternberg, 1983).”
Let’s make one thing clear. In every aspect of language, the research always comes to the same conclusion: Isolated skill drills don’t work. Although much of the research is dogmatic in this belief, I believe it’s more accurate to say that it’s not an effective use of time.
In reality, many school curriculums do use isolated skill drills. Many worksheets and workbooks are, in reality, isolated skill drills. Because I understand and believe what the research says is true, I do worksheets and workbook work much faster than I used to, and I don’t supplement with nearly as many worksheets as I once did. Instead, I use that time for real reading, writing, and content learning.
As relates to vocabulary acquisition, Nagy and Townsend put it this way in Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition (2012): “Vocabulary learning must occur in authentic contexts, with students having many opportunities to learn how target words interact with, garner meaning from, and support meanings of other words. Indeed, contemporary texts for teachers encourage the practice of identifying meaningful words for instruction within academic materials and then teaching those words within the contexts in which they are used.”
Although a certain amount of vocabulary instruction is already built into our curriculums, many teachers believe that their students need additional or better vocabulary instruction. Furthermore, many teachers believe that developing an amazing vocabulary is such a significant and important part of creating successful students that they want to be optimally effective in their instruction.
To be optimally effective, teachers need systems, routines, techniques, and strategies. Additionally, teachers need to use their time wisely and build on the materials that they are already required to use and already use. In order to do all this, teachers need to understand what they are doing. It’s that simple. And that’s our goal here—to better understand what we are doing beyond worksheets!
What is Incidental and Intentional Vocabulary Acquisition?
Incidental vs. Intentional—this is the first concept to understand. It’s also essential to understand.
✈ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition is the process of learning vocabulary unintentionally and subconsciously as we read, write, speak, and listen. Students learn new vocabulary words incidentally both in school and in their daily lives outside of school. Wide reading is an essential component of this form of vocabulary learning, as the written word uses a larger vocabulary base than the spoken word.
✈ Intentional Vocabulary Acquisition is the process of intentionally learning new words and vocabulary skills in order to develop a larger vocabulary. This process usually requires direct instruction.
In Advancing Our Students’ Language and Literacy: The Challenge of Complex Texts (2011), Marilyn Jager Adams put it this way: “So, what is the best way to help students master the many, many words they must know to understand advanced texts? In broad terms, there appear to be only two options:”
1. Intentional Learning: “to endeavor to teach students the words they will need to know, and”
2. Incidental Learning: “to expect students to learn new words through reading.”
In The 40 Years War (2018), Stephen Krashen, a strong proponent of learning vocabulary incidentally through reading, says this:
“For the last 40-plus years, we have been engaged in a war between two hypotheses, two views on how we acquire language and develop literacy. It is a good war, because no matter which side eventually wins, we will be learning a great deal.”
Incidental Learning: “The Comprehension Hypothesis states that we acquire language and develop literacy when we understand messages, that is, when we understand what we hear and what we read, when we receive ‘comprehensible input.’ Language acquisition is a subconscious process; while it is happening we are not aware that it is happening, and the competence developed this way is stored in the brain subconsciously.”
Intentional Learning: “The rival to the Comprehension Hypothesis is the Skill-Building Hypothesis. The Skill-Building Hypothesis says that to acquire language, we first memorize vocabulary and learn grammar rules consciously and then practice them in output until they become ‘automatic’: In other words, consciously learned knowledge eventually becomes subconsciously ‘acquired’ knowledge. Skill-Building also holds that we can adjust our consciously learned rules when we are corrected.”
Understanding the War: Is Reading Alone Enough? Is Direct Vocabulary Instruction a Waste of Time?
Most teachers know that wide reading is an essential component of their students’ vocabulary acquisition. After all, it’s quite obvious to most people that voracious readers tend to have excellent vocabularies.
However, questions remain:
1. Is reading alone enough? Can students really develop excellent vocabularies without any intention?
2. Is intentional direct vocabulary instruction a waste of time, or does it provide benefit?
3. Can we harness the power and usefulness of both forms of vocabulary acquisition to create a synergy of learning?
In Effective Vocabulary Instruction for English-Language Learners (2006), Graves and Fitzgerald say, “Children learn most of their vocabulary from reading (Sternberg, 1983). Therefore, if we substantially increase the amount of reading they do, we can markedly increase their vocabularies. Moreover, wide reading fosters automaticity, provides knowledge about different topics and literary forms, and puts students on the road to becoming lifelong readers.”
In The Effects of Vocabulary Instruction (1986), Stahl and Fairbanks say, “Recently, there has been some discussion of the futility of vocabulary instruction (Nagy & Herman, 1984; Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985) versus its fertility (Beck, McKeown, & Omanson, 1984). Nagy and Herman estimate that the number of distinct words in printed school English is about 88,500, a number too large to instruct. They estimate that children will learn between 1,000 and 5,000 new words from context each year, given normal exposure to printed text. Since a vocabulary teaching program typically teaches 10 to 12 words a week or about 400 a year, of which perhaps 75% or 300 are learned, vocabulary instruction is not adequate to cope with the volume of new words that children need to learn and do learn without instruction.”
In Direct Instruction of Academic Vocabulary: What About Real Reading? (2012), Stephen Krashen further quotes Nagy’s research, “Nagy has published compelling evidence supporting the hypothesis that we gradually acquire vocabulary from reading for meaning, evidence that suggests that reading alone can do the job of building a large vocabulary, and that reading for meaning is more efficient than direct instruction for vocabulary development (Nagy, Herman, and Anderson, 1985; Nagy, Anderson and Herman, 1987; Nagy and Herman, 1987). After studying the size of the vocabulary appearing in printed school English, Nagy and Anderson (1984) conclude that ‘our findings indicate that even the most ruthlessly systematic direct vocabulary instruction could neither account for a significant proportion of all the words the children actually learn, nor cover more than a modest proportion of the words they will encounter in school reading materials.’”
Ironically, Krashen wrote the preceding in response to Nagy and Townsend’s article that focuses on direct instruction and intervention. Krashen states, “Because of its focus on instruction and intervention, the article gives the impression that direct instruction is the only means for the development of academic vocabulary. Nagy and Townsend emphasized that ‘vocabulary learning must occur in authentic contexts, with students having many opportunities to learn how target words interact with, garner meaning from, and support meanings of other words’ (p. 98), but they did not mention that this happens when we read real texts we are interested in and focus on their meaning.”
My Conclusion: Here is how I look at it. No one denies that reading is essential in improving our students’ vocabulary. With this in mind, most of our direct vocabulary instruction should be such that it creates a synergy with students’ in-class reading and students’ independent reading. Based on my experience, students won’t learn new words as best they can while reading if they are not instructed on how to do so and encouraged to do so.
In contrast, the research does not support spending time on out-of-context word lists and word learning. The goal of most direct vocabulary instruction should be to teach students the techniques and strategies that foster word consciousness and that students can use while reading. Ideally, we want to use words that are in the texts that we are reading so that students will better understand the texts. If you are using worksheets, open up a book and show your students how it connects to the texts they are reading.
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Reading and Vocabulary Acquisition for English Language Learners (ELLs)
It’s a mistake to assume that English language learners (ELLs) acquire vocabulary in the same way as native speakers. It’s also a mistake to assume that they don’t. Personally, I learned and became fluent in a second language as an adult. In short, when you are a substitute teacher in a bilingual-education kindergarten class where the students don’t understand (at least they pretend they don’t understand) a single word of English, you begin learning vocabulary very quickly.
The research uses two categories: L1 = native speaker, and L2 = learning a second language. In reality, I say that we have three categories:
✈ L1: native speaker
✈ L2: second language learner in immersion
✈ L2: second language learner that is not in immersion
I point this out so teachers can put what follows in perspective. People who are in an immersive environment are motivated differently from people who are not. Additionally, in an immersive environment, the words that help one understand and communicate are by far the most important words. In an immersive environment, the word biblioteca only rises to importance if you are at the biblioteca or going to the biblioteca or see a biblioteca or hear the word biblioteca.
In Effective Vocabulary Instruction for English-Language Learners (2006), Graves and Fitzgerald outline the same four-part vocabulary program for English language learners as they do for native English speakers:
1. Rich and Varied Language Experiences: “By language experiences,” Graves and Fitzgerald “mean listening, speaking, reading, and writing.” Graves calls this Wide Reading in his literature that focuses on native English speakers. However, reading and interactive reading is still strongly emphasized for ELL students.
2. Teaching Individual Words
3. Teaching Word-Learning Strategies
4. Fostering Word Consciousness
In Incidental Learning of Vocabulary (2018), Cervatiuc relates the stages of ELL (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) to vocabulary acquisition and reading. Cervatiuc says, “There are several factors that affect incidental learning of vocabulary, which may explain why second language (L2) learners pick up vocabulary at different rates. Some of these factors are: lexical difficulty level of texts, word repetition, generative word uses, contextual richness, and salience. Beginning L2 learners should focus on intentional vocabulary learning, intermediate learners on vocabulary learning strategies so that they can effectively learn from contexts, and advanced learners on incidental vocabulary learning from extensive reading. In order to acquire vocabulary incidentally from reading and listening, L2 learners need to understand at least 98% of the words in written texts and spoken language. Teachers can increase their students’ rates of incidental vocabulary learning, by exposing them to written and spoken texts that are level‐appropriate, clear, rich, and supportive and that provide enough repetition of the new words.”
Stephen Krashen is a strong proponent and believer in vocabulary acquisition through reading for L1 students and both types of L2 students—i.e., students in immersion and not in immersion. In Extensive Reading in English as Foreign Language by Adolescents and Young Adults (2007), Krashen says, “Despite the consistently positive results of extensive reading programs, there still seem to be doubts as to its effectiveness: Study after study says it works, but very few language programs have adopted it.”
A Final Note: The main tool I finally settled on for learning Spanish was reading—I listened to the audiobook version in English while reading the book in Spanish. I read many great stories this way and learned many new words, along with the nuances of the grammar and the language. Of course, I was self-motivated and researched everything that I didn’t understand. Additionally, I spent a great deal of vacation time for several years in immersion settings.
Effective Vocabulary Instruction #1: Five Guiding Principles
What’s changed in vocabulary instruction since 1978? As you will see in this section and the next, neither the guiding principles nor the strategies have changed much. The take away from this is that if teachers see ideas that were valid 40 years ago and are still valid today, they may want to harness this time-tested knowledge.
In Vocabulary Improvement: Program Goals and Exemplary Techniques (1978), Standal and Schaefer outline five guiding principles of a worthwhile vocabulary improvement program:
1. “Vocabulary improvement attempts are most successful when vocabulary is directly, rather than incidentally, taught. [NOTE: It’s now widely accepted that students learn most new words incidentally and by reading in particular. My personal view is that all direct vocabulary instruction must be viewed as an opportunity to inspire students’ word consciousness.]
2. “Vocabulary improvement, to be successful, requires a long-term commitment.
3. “Vocabulary improvement is not the sole responsibility of the English teacher or reading teacher. All teachers should be involved.
4. “Vocabulary improvement is best accomplished when words are taught in meaningful contexts.
5. Vocabulary improvement should include technical words unique to a given content area and more generally-used words that are used in subject-specific ways. The words are best introduced in the affected content area. In the case of the non-technical words, reinforcement, review, and broadening of the definition could be done in other classes.”
Effective Vocabulary Instruction #2: Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary
In Vocabulary Improvement: Program Goals and Exemplary Techniques (1978), Standal and Schaefer say this:
“To be successful, a vocabulary improvement program should teach vocabulary directly but in a meaningful context, involve teachers and use vocabulary from all content areas, and represent a long term commitment. Strategies promoting an effective program include the following:
1. teaching word consciousness,
2. using materials at students’ instructional levels to help develop reading vocabulary,
3. presenting contextual analysis as a tool in reading comprehension,
4. studying word etymology,
5. teaching structural analysis,
6. using synonyms and antonyms to help students learn word meaning through association,
7. increasing students’ awareness of words with multiple meanings,
8. building awareness of symbols, abbreviations, and acronyms to help increase comprehension,
9. pointing out the use and misuse of figurative language,
10. using structured overviews of text chapters to help clarify the relationships among words and concepts,
11. encouraging students to find new words in print, and
12. providing specific instruction in the use of specialized vocabulary.
School-wide commitment to vocabulary development allows students to make lasting gains in receptive, productive, technical, and nontechnical vocabularies.”
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Effective Vocabulary Instruction #3: The Four Essential Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction
In Reading for Meaning: Fostering Comprehension in the Middle Grades (2000), Graves outlines four essential components of well-rounded and effective vocabulary instruction: 1) Wide Reading, 2) Teaching Individual Words, 3) Teaching Word-Learning Strategies, and 4) Fostering Word Consciousness.
1. Incidental Learning: Wide Reading: “Wide reading means extensive reading—reading a lot in a variety of materials. Wide reading is, of course, important for a host of reasons, but it is particularly important to vocabulary growth. If students learn to read something like 3,000 to 4,000 words each year, it is clear that most of the words they learn are not taught directly.”
2. Intentional Learning: Teaching Individual Words: “Teaching individual words is the part of a vocabulary program that typically gets the lion’s share of attention in the classroom, and it is the part of a vocabulary program on which we have the most concrete and practical advice.” Graves goes on to address two aspects of this topic:
a) Selecting Vocabulary to Teach
b) Differences in Word Learning Tasks
Q Teaching words that represent available concepts.
Q Teaching words that represent new and challenging concepts. (e.g., Frayer model).
3. Intentional Learning: Teaching Word-Learning Strategies: “Unlike teaching individual words, which is a very frequent activity in schools, teaching students strategies for learning words themselves is a very infrequent activity… This is very bad news… if students are to really profit from the wide reading that is so important to vocabulary growth, they need to be adept at learning words as they are reading. Three word-learning strategies are particularly worth spending time on—1) using context to infer word meaning, 2) using word parts to arrive at word meaning, and 3) using the dictionary to learn or verify word meanings. Of these three, using context is almost certainly the most important (Sternberg, 1987).”
4. Intentional Learning: Fostering Word Consciousness: “Students who are word-conscious know a lot of words and know them well. Equally importantly, they are interested in words, and they gain enjoyment and satisfaction from using them well and from seeing or hearing them used well by others.” Graves points out that fostering word consciousness is relatively easy compared to teaching word-learning strategies, and he outlines four techniques for doing so:
a) Modeling Adept Diction in Our Own Speech and Writing
b) Recognizing Adept Diction in Texts Students Are Reading
c) Recognizing and Encouraging Adept Diction in Children’s Speech and Writing
d) Promoting Word Play Such as the Use of Clichés and Puns
How Much Time Does Effective Vocabulary Instruction Take? Answer: 65 Minutes per Week.
Early in my career, I would latch onto topics that I thought held vital keys to my students’ success. I would end up collecting worksheets or buying a workbook related to that topic, and I would end up devoting too much time to what I now see as a somewhat minor topic in a much larger topic.
I discovered through experience what the research says is true: isolated skill drills don’t work, and spiraling is a better use of time than staying stuck on a topic.
I mention this for a very important reason: I’ve seen many vocabulary workbooks that look like a very poor use of time. It’s not that they have no value; it’s that they take time away from activities that have much more value.
Once again, in Reading for Meaning: Fostering Comprehension in the Middle Grades (2000), Graves outlines the four essential components of effective vocabulary instruction. Graves also gives guidance on the time requirements for each component. The big takeaway from Graves’ guidance on time is on how to avoid the time-related trap discussed above. These time recommendations serve as a guide for helping teachers keep their vocabulary instruction well-round, consistent, and constantly moving forward.
Keep in mind that it’s relatively easy to take action on multiple vocabulary components at once. I sure don’t view them as mutually exclusive.
1. Wide Reading: 15 Minutes per Week: Graves explains that if students do 60 minutes of sustained silent reading each week, we will count 15 minutes of that as vocabulary instruction, as reading has benefits beyond mere vocabulary acquisition.
2. Teaching Individual Words: 20 Minutes per Week: Graves recommends teaching individual words as needed. This activity may add up to about 20 minutes per week.
For many teachers, this 20-minute recommendation should put things in perspective. The reality is that if we teach a class full of young ELL students, we can’t stop and teach every word that they don’t know or even every word that they need. If we did, we wouldn’t have time for wide reading, interactive reading, writing, teaching context clues, teaching content, and teaching other word-learning strategies.
3. Teaching Word-Learning Strategies: 20 Minutes per Week: Graves explains that it takes a substantial time investment for the first few weeks to teach word-learning strategies (2-4 hours a week), but that teachers will use these strategies throughout the school year. It will average out to 20 minutes per week.
4. Fostering Word Consciousness: 10 Minutes per Week: Graves describes fostering word consciousness as “almost free,” as it can be done through comments and drawing attention to words and word choices throughout the school day. He allocates 10 minutes per week to this activity.
All of this adds up to 65 minutes per week.
But How Exactly Do I Teach Vocabulary?
The reality of teaching vocabulary is that teachers must find and use the techniques, systems, routines, and strategies that work for them and their students. Teachers must figure out what works, and teachers must figure out how to use what works in the time that they have.
The most time-efficient way to improve our students’ vocabulary is to combine our vocabulary efforts and instruction with what we are already doing across the curriculum. We want to combine our vocabulary efforts and instruction with:
1. subject content/subject-content instruction.
2. reading/reading instruction.
3. writing/writing instruction.
How do we do this? That’s an excellent question. Here are a few more questions to ask yourself:
1. What are some ways I can more effectively teach vocabulary? How can I be sure that I am using my time wisely and getting results? How can I create a vocabulary synergy with everything else I do?
2. What are some ways I can routinely bring vocabulary instruction and vocabulary awareness into my classroom? What are some excellent vocabulary systems, routines, techniques, and strategies that I can use and that I will use?
In Vocabulary Instruction: Three Contemporary Issues (2010), Fisher, Blachowicz, and Watts-Taffe listed the most pressing questions that teachers have about vocabulary instruction. I’ve placed them in first-person question form:
1. What are some ways that I can motivate students to learn new words?
2. What are some ways that I can provide multiple exposures to new words?
3. What are some ways that I can support wide reading?
4. What are some ways that I can teach students to use context clues such that it leads to independent use of this strategy?
5. What are some ways that I can support students in self-selecting words they need to learn?
By asking the questions, you are well on your way to finding the answers. Furthermore, we often know the answers, but we still need to ask the questions to make the issues concrete and to motivate and inspire us to take action.
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How Should Teachers Select Vocabulary Words to Teach?
Have you ever been frustrated by the words that your curriculums choose to spend time on? Have you ever felt that you would have chosen differently and better? I sure have. The reality is that curriculums choose words for the center of the bell curve, and many of our students are at the ends.
Teachers need to understand how to select vocabulary words for three reasons:
1. Teachers will understand the logic behind how and why their curriculums have chosen the vocabulary words.
2. Teachers will understand how to meet the needs of their students beyond what their curriculums choose.
3. Teachers will understand how to choose their own words that will benefit their students most.
Across the curriculum, teachers want to get in the habit of looking at words and placing them into categories. We will look at a couple of models that will help teachers create a nice foundation for doing this.
Off the top of my head, when I look at words, I place them into four categories. In reality, many words fall into two or three of these categories at the same time. In other words, the categories are not mutually exclusive.
1. Topic Specific: These are important words that are related to the current topic.
2. Complex: These are important complex words that are common and interesting.
3. Common: These are common and high-frequency words that are essential.
4. Structural: These are words that will help students understand other interesting or important words.
Here are two more models that will help teachers develop the habit of classifying words and selecting words to teach their students.
Four Questions to Ask When Selecting Vocabulary Words
In Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (1998), Graves, Juel, and Graves present four questions for helping teachers select vocabulary.
1. “Is understanding the word important to understanding the selection in which it appears? If the answer is no, then other words are probably more important to teach.”
2. “Are students able to use context or structural analysis skills to discover the word’s meaning? If they can use these skills, then they should be allowed to practice them. Doing so will both help them consolidate these skills and reduce the number of words you need to teach.”
3. “Can working with this word be useful in furthering students’ context, structural analysis, or dictionary skills? If the answer is yes; then your working with the word can serve two purposes. It can aid students in learning the word, and it can help them acquire a strategy they can use in learning other words. You might, for example, decide to teach the word regenerate because students needed to master the prefix re-.”
4. “How useful is this word outside of the current reading selection? The more frequently a word appears in material students read, the more important it is for them to know the word. Additionally, the more frequently a word is used, the greater the chances that students will retain the word once you teach it.”
More Questions to Ask When Selecting Vocabulary Words
In Better Learning Through Structured Teaching (2008), Fisher and Fry present a more comprehensive model for selecting vocabulary words:
Representative
✈ Is the word representative of a family of words that students should know?
✈ Is the concept represented by the word critical to understanding the text?
✈ Is the word a label for an idea that students need to know?
✈ Does the word represent an idea that is essential for understanding another concept?
Repeatability
✈ Will the word be used again in this text?
✈ If so, does the word occur often enough to be redundant?
✈ Will the word be used again during the school year?
Transportable
✈ Will the word be used in group discussions?
✈ Will the word be used in writing tasks?
✈ Will the word be used in other content or subject areas?
Contextual Analysis
✈ Can students use context clues to determine the correct or intended meaning of the word without instruction?
Structural Analysis
✈ Can students use structural analysis to determine the correct or intended meaning of the word without instruction?
Cognitive Load
✈ Have I identified too many words for students to successfully integrate?
