Effective Vocabulary Instruction for English Learners

There's a lot of talk lately about teaching vocabulary and the necessity of teaching vocabulary for reading comprehension and academic development. While we are not refuting that all students need explicit vocabulary development, we have seen that vocabulary development has become such an isolated teaching skill in some cases that students won't have a deep understanding of the vocabulary words taught. 

Vocabulary instruction for English learners needs to be highly contextualized, meaning that it must be taught in the context of meaningful instruction. It defeats the purpose to have a "word of the day" that may be isolated from anything that students are learning. There is a really great book that we recommend by Robert Marzano, Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement: Research on What Works in Schools. In the book, Marzano outlines eight principles of academic vocabulary development:

1. Effective vocabulary instruction does not just consist of giving students a definition of the word, or having students look up the definition of a word in the dictionary. Students should be exposed to the word many times in the context of meaningful instruction and teachers should provide a study friendly definition of the word.
2. Students should be able to express their knowledge of the words through both "linguistic and nonlinguistic representations". This may include drawing, pictures, graphic organizers, acting the word out, etc.
3. Effective vocabulary instruction includes multiple exposures to certain words across a variety of contexts. In order for students to retain a word in long term memory and have an in-depth understanding of words, students must be exposed to words in books, writing, etc. It is not enough to discuss a word once or twice and assume that students will have completely understood the word.
4. Students need to be taught the morphology of the word, which includes prefixes, suffixes, and root words. An excellent resource for prefixes, suffixes and other words parts is the ESL Teacher's Book of Lists.
5. Different types of words need a different method of instruction. Some words require more direct instruction than others.
6. Students need to be given opportunities for students to discuss the words that they are learning. Project GLAD defines this as opportunities to have "comprehensible output"; many of Project GLAD's guided oral practice strategies offer multiple opportunities to use vocabulary in meaningful ways.
7. Students should play with words through games and other fun activities.
8. Students should be taught words that have a high chance of raising academic achievement. Marzano has put together essential lists of key vocabulary words per school subject that students need to learn. Another valuable resource for teachers is the ESL Teacher's Book of Lists and the Vocabulary Teacher's Book of Lists. 

What Does This Look Like in the Classroom?

Let's take a second grade example regarding important people in the community. We looked at the state standards, and looked through the Social Studies textbook that students were using for key academic vocabulary that we wanted to teach students. We wanted to make sure that students were exposed to the vocabulary in multiple ways, so we employed many strategies designed to provide multiple exposures to certain words. One strategy that we used was a cognitive content dictionary (a Project GLAD strategy). 

Next we read the textbook and other books with students in order to expose the vocabulary words to students. If our chosen vocabulary words were not in the given books, then we strategically used them with students in our discussions of the texts.

The next strategy that we employed was the use of songs, poems and chants to facilitate vocabulary development. We created a few poems with many of the same vocabulary words in each poem. After presenting the poems once to students, we then asked the students which words they thought were high-level words and we highlighted the words that they identified.

Here's another poem:

We also used a couple of other poems that can be found here. In addition to these strategies, there are many other strategies such as shared/modeled writing, pictorial input charts, that could have been employed as well.

In our next post, we will highlight a few more strategies that can be used with this heroes/important people unit in order that students retain the academic vocabulary in their long term memory.

We've got to go beyond the traditional pictures/drawings/realia that we often hear of when discussing the education of English learners. What are some other strategies that you use to teach vocabulary in context?