Vocabulary Instruction: Research to Practice [Paperback]

I am an educator who recently had to overhaul and redesign a large-scale vocabulary instruction program. The information in this book was invaluable to me. I found it to be accurate, insightful, actionable, well-organized, and comprehensive.

As another teacher suggested, this book is not full of teaching activities, lesson plans, or word lists. (If you want that kind of book, you might try The Vocabulary Teacher's Book of Lists.) It is, however, full of big-picture facts and credible answers to important questions. It gave me confidence in my approach and helped me make many decisions. It also helped me plan teacher training.

If you are teaching in a traditional classroom setting with an established curriculum and an established set of practices, this book will probably not change the way you teach very much (although it might be interesting). However, if you are making larger-scale decisions about your vocabulary program, this book is a wonderful resource.

If you are a teacher who would like to become familiar with the latest academic research regarding vocabulary acquisition, but who has neither time nor energy to wade through hundreds of pages of technical research in academic journals, then this is the book for you!
Too often, a wide ravine separates literacy teachers from academic researchers in the field. The teachers tend to focus on practical textbooks, oriented around lesson plans for specific grades (such as those in the Scholastic Teaching Resources series), while the researchers produce highly technical articles published in journals such as the Journal of Child Language or Reading Research Quarterly, which are all but inaccessible to the average teacher, whether because of the lengthy and technical nature of the articles, or because of the limited time available to practicing schoolteachers.
However, the present compendium of articles successfully bridges this gap, bringing the latest results of academic literacy research to the literacy teacher. Concepts are presented clearly and succinctly, in a fashion which underscores their relevance to the challenges of the literacy classroom. At the same time, however, these studies do not suffice with a simple recital of the research results; rather, they also include detailed explanations of the field tests from which the concepts emerge, along with complete bibliographical references. Thus, the reader emerges informed not only of the results of the research but with an overview of the research process as well; and the reader who wishes to explore any given matter further needs only follow up the copious bibliographical notes within.
Underlying most of the studies within the book is the contention that wide reading will generally not suffice to build a child's vocabulary. On the one hand, studies show that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the context surrounding unfamiliar words is not sufficiently rich to allow the child to learn the words in any meaningful way. Additionally, the frequency of unfamiliar words tends to be too low for the words to become ingrained within the mind of the reader. On the other hand, additional studies demonstrate that using a variety of proactive instruction strategies, significant quantities of words can be acquired and internalized, such that reading comprehension is bolstered considerably. These latter studies investigate strategies for analyzing unfamiliar words (such as morphology instruction), as well as methods for heightening awareness of new words (such as the Vocabulary Self Selection method).
Given the wide range of authors included within this compendium, it is natural that some differing viewpoints will emerge. For instance, although the word "predict" is used by Shane Templeton as a prime example of a word which can generate a fruitful morphology session in the classroom (page 133), Michael Graves, in his discussion of prefix instruction 50 pages earlier, specifically notes that words such as "predict" are not sufficiently transparent and should be excluded from morphology discussions (page 83). Nevertheless, such differing positions are perfectly reasonable and are certainly welcome in the present book, allowing teachers to make informed decisions, choosing varying methods and strategies as appropriate for their particular students.
The one fault which I have found in this book is that the authors fail to take their vocabulary acquisition methods one step further, towards the writing process. That is, the overarching concern of virtually every one of the writers is the learning of vocabulary for reading comprehension. While this is certainly a worthy goal, and certainly precedes any effort placed upon developing writing skills, I felt that the research explored here regarding the integration of new vocabulary should have also been exploited to develop strategies which would encourage the students to use the newly acquired words in their writing as well.

This review of research is just as important for the Non Reading classroom teacher.

I started by skipping through the chapters that I thought applied to me, but ended up reading all of the chapters and finding use for all of the information.

I shared this with collegues who ended up buying their own copies!

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