A Response to Focus on Vocabulary
After reading this week’s article and looking at some of the different blogs that have already been posted, I believe there is a little confusion. In the blog A Focus on Vocabulary, the author says that only eight to ten words can be learnt per week. The author did not understand how so few words could be learnt when students have so many different classes and life experiences occurring, where they are exposed to so many different words. After reviewing Lehr’s article, I believe that the blog author misunderstood parts of the reading. Lehr states that only eight to ten new words can be effectively taught each week, however there are other ways for students to learn more words. If we could only learn new words by being taught them, we would only learn approximately four hundred words per year, however Lehr states that humans learn two thousand to three thousand five hundred words per year. Therefore, students are able to learn more words through incidental learning, where they are exposed to other words through their own reading. The amount of words that students learn through this manner is indicative to the amount of reading and exposure students have to different vocabulary terms.