Reflection – A Focus on Vocabulary
In reading the article on vocabulary, one thing that really resonated with me is the strong connection between reading and incidental accumulation of vocabulary. Coming from a family that did not use English as a primary language, my oral language experience in the home environment provided little support in building my English lexicon. However, conversations with my family members are typically highly interactive — detailed accounts of what has been happening at school are encouraged and described regularly at the dinner table. In addition, my parents took me to the library every week and I prowled the shelves in search of my next favourite author or series. Reading to me was an obsession, and I attribute my steady increase in vocabulary to reading on a daily basis.
However, many children of non-English speaking families may encounter difficulty in adjusting to language used in school — this relates back to the idea of a teacher’s “invisible criteria” or expectation of a certain level of language proficiency not explicitly taught in the classroom. Some ways to ameliorate the struggles experienced by these students — who may in fact be quite proficient in common oral language (e.g. BICS) — can include the teacher directing students to reading resources that target specific areas of language weakness or giving general guidelines to the types of reading material that best suit the student’s level. In an English classroom, such reading material would typically include the more literary pieces such as prose and poetry.
Lucy Y.