Recap on Week 4: Randy’s Input
Week 4 Readings: A Focus on Vocabulary
Key Points:
What is Vocabulary? (General) = Knowledge of words and word meanings.
Vocabulary as defined by teachers= hard words that students encounter in content area textbook and literature selections.
The article’s definition of vocabulary: words that students must know in order to advance their reading levels to understand demanding texts with comprehension.
Words come in 2 forms= Oral and Print.
Word Knowledge comes in 2 forms= Receptive and productive. (Receptive= words that we recognize when we hear or see them. Productive= words that we use when we speak or write.)
The importance of Vocabulary to Reading Comprehension:
(Trend: [If] students don’t have sufficient word knowledge to understand what they read, they typically avoid reading.)
Matthew Effects= “Good readers read more, become better readers, and learn more words; poor readers read less, become poorer readers, and learn fewer words.”
One of the solutions listed in the article: If children have the printed words in their oral vocabulary, they can more easily and quickly sound out, read, and understand them, as well as comprehend what they are reading.
Word Knowledge is “incremental”, “multidimensional”, and “interrelated”.
Word Schema= A network of knowledge related to a word.
Kinds of Reading Necessary to Produce Vocabulary Growth: The article indicates that students should read some text for leisure and some that challenges them. If the teacher offers some guidance when selecting books, it can greatly increase productivity during reading periods.
Rule of Thumb: Rare words that come up in literature very few times should be taught at point-of-contact, Tier Two words/words that come up in student texts that the reader might not necessarily know should be taught more because they are the ones that add most to students’ language knowledge.
Synonyms: Teachers should teach those casually as they come up to increase their student’s vocab knowledge.
Morphemes and Morphology: words that cannot be broken down into smaller parts= morpheme. Morphology= study of word formation. (Derivational suffixes useful to teach: something like -ial should be mentioned to students that it means (relating to) )
Cognates: e.g. Luna= latin root. Lunar= english literary academic word.
Reflection: Very interesting read. I can’t even summarize all the key points on here. As I was reskimming the article I can’t help but to keep highlighting the key points I found in this article. My most favourite parts of the article include learning about the Matthew Effects: how a proficient student will do better and better and how a struggling student will be less and less motivated to read. Also, I found out some root word examples in the derivative suffixes section that even I wasn’t even clear about in the beginning (-ial) so it really intrigued me to pay more attention when I come across something like this to keep in mind to alert my future students about these certain endings.