I am always looking for ways to improve students' reading comprehension.
One thing that the research, shows is that there is a direct link between vocab knowledge and comprehension with vocabulary knowledge being one of the best predictors of reading comprehension ability.
Vocabulary can be organised into 3 tiers.
Most students know a huge number of tier 1 words by the time they are Year 7 and they often know tier 3 words for things that they are interested in (think of a child who loves dinosaurs) or have learnt about. But for a number of students there is a big gap in tier 2 word knowledge. I notice that students will often express an idea or concept using tier 1 words rather than a more precise, tier 2 word. For example a student may say “I put all my books away in the right place so they are tidy and easy to find.” rather than say “I organised my books.” Organise is the tier 2 word and is more precise than tidy, right place, easy to find. Another example could be a student asking “Do you need me to give out the worksheets?" rather than “Do you need me to distribute (tier 2 word) the worksheets?”
Tier 1 words are often learnt from context and conversation but as students move through school there is a shift from oral contexts to written ones. It is hard to encounter a lot of unfamiliar tier 2 words, often enough for them to become familiar and automatic. Explicitly teaching tier 2 words is believed to be the most beneficial way to increase tier 2 word knowledge and to therefore increase reading comprehension.
One way to explicitly teach tier 2 vocabulary is to have a word of the week. Learning is often more efficient when it is multi-sensory, even for older students. Hearing, saying, acting (sign language), drawing and seeing a word in a picture helps the brain retain new words. Using a ‘word of the week’ resource (which I have) keeps it simple and easy to manage.
I found, unexpectedly although not surprising when I thought about it, that once we were a few weeks into ‘word of the week’ kids started to get excited about vocabulary. They would notice other tier 2 words and I would hear them in classroom chatter. The word wall became places where students would take over, proudly putting words up as they found them. They were more likely to pick up a dictionary or thesaurus and find the definition of a word they didn’t know or to find better words. We would stop our shared reading to notice and discuss vocabulary.
Explicitly teaching vocabulary is powerful but simple. When students know more words they feel more confident and they learn that words have meaning and value.
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