Learning Words Inside and Out: Creating a School-Wide

Vocabulary Initiative

Douglas Fisher and Nancy FreySan Diego State University

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2008). Word wise and content rich: Five essential steps to teaching academic vocabulary. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

How Often Has This Occurred?In a U.S. History class, the teacher says,“Look up

these vocabulary words and write a sentence using the word.”

• Appeal (n): attractiveness that interests, pleases, or stimulates

Shawna appeal to me from her good looks.

Vocabulary Goes to College

• 165 college freshmen enrolled in a remedial reading course found that vocabulary was the only significant variable to make a statistically significant contribution to measures of literal and critical reading comprehension, evaluation, and appreciation of reading materials (Farley & Elmore, 1992)

• Those with lower vocabulary scores were less likely to challenge information in passages (Baker, 1985)

• Less-skilled readers make limited use of context and over-generalize passages to try to explain the meaning of unknown words (McKeown, 1985)

Learning Vocabulary?

Both high- and low-achieving college freshmen readers:

• Used only rote memorization to learn vocabulary

• Didn’t see why it was necessary

• Scored poorly on using vocabulary in writing (Francis & Simpson, 2003)

The Numbers Game

• Need to know 88,500 word families by ninth grade (Nagy & Anderson, 1984)

= 500,000 words TOO MANY! Let’s cut it in half

= 250,000 words 1620 days (K-8, never absent)

= 154 words per day! How are you doing?

Barriers to Vocabulary Development in Secondary

• Schedules require conceptual shifts every 50-90 minutes

• 4-8 teachers a day who use different methods and devote different amounts of time to vocabulary

• Schools that operate within, but not across departments

• Content area teachers who know their vocabulary, but not effective ways to develop it

• Belief that vocabulary is the English department’s job

An Intentional Vocabulary Initiative

• Make it intentional through word selection and intentional instruction.

• Make it transparent through teacher modeling of word-solving and word learning.

• Make it useable with collaborative learning.• Make it personal by fostering student

ownership.• Make it a priority with schoolwide practices. Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2008). Word wise and content rich: Five essential steps to teaching academic vocabulary.

Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Step 1: Make it Intentional: Selecting Words

Influence of Background Knowledge

Catherine the Great, a minor aristocrat from Germany, became Empress of Russia when her husband Peter, the grandson of Peter the Great, was killed.

Types of Vocabulary• Tier 1/General

– Commonplace; learned from interactions with texts and people

• Tier 2/Specialized– Change meaning with context (“polysemic”)

• Tier 3/Technical– Specific to the disciplineA starting point for selecting vocabulary

The Problem: Too Many Words!

• 17 words identified in 2 paragraphs

• Ideal is 8-10 a week for deep teaching (Scott, Jamieson-Noel, and Asselin, 2003)

• Must be narrowed, but how?

Questions for Selecting Vocabulary

1. Representative

2. Repeatability

3. Transportable

4. Contextual Analysis

5. Structural Analysis

6. Cognitive Load

• Is it critical to understanding?• Will it be used again?• Is it needed for discussions or

writing?• Can they use context to figure it

out?• Can they use structure?• Have I exceeded the number they

can learn?

Adapted from Graves, 2006; Nagy, 1988; Marzano & Pickering, 2005

Using Word Lists to Identify Vocabulary

• Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000)– 570 headwords from textbooks

• Ogden’s Basic English Word List– Dreamed of a “universal language”– 850 phonetically regular words

• Word Part Lists– Focus on prefixes, derivations– Do you know what saggital means? How do you

know?

Step 2: Make it Transparent: Modeling

Teacher Modeling• Brief (5-10 minutes) think-

alouds• Identify unfamiliar words to

learn procedures for discerning meaning

• Show students how to look inside (morphology and structure) and outside (context clues and resources) words

Morphology and Word Parts

• Affixes

• Root words

• Derivations

• Cognates for English learners

• Beware of false cognates! (embarrassed/embarazada)

But Context Isn’t Always Enough…

The documentary film March of the Penguins was a surprise hit in 2005. However, the movie neglected to point out that the population of emperor penguins is thinning.

Since the 1970s, the penguins’ neighborhood has become increasingly warm. The Southern Ocean experiences natural shifts in weather from one decade to the next, but this warm spell has continued, causing the thinning of sea ice. Less sea ice means fewer krill, the penguins’ main food source. Also, the weakened ice is more likely to break apart and drift out to sea, carrying off the young penguin chicks, who often drown.

Is global warming responsibility for the thinning of penguin population? Scientists believe so. (Gore, 2007, p. 94)

Think aloud to clear up confusions about skinny penguins!

Resources

• Peer resources from productive group work

• Dictionaries• Bookmark Internet

resources • Model how you use

these (Phone a Friend, dictionary use on doc camera)

Step 3: Make it Useable: Collaborating with Peers

Oral Language and Vocabulary

• Teacher talk dominates most classrooms (Cazden, 2001)

• Middle school math students taught to use heuristic vocabulary in discussions achieved a higher levels (Koichu, Berman, & Moore, 2007)

• High school world language students who constructed word maps with peers acquired more vocabulary (Morin & Goebel, 2001)

Tips for Productive Group Work

• Establish purpose (content, language, and social goals)

• Variety is the spice of life

• Integrate activities into content flow

Fostering Collaboration• Partner and small-group

discussions• Jigsaws• Student think-alouds• Reciprocal teaching• Co-constructed graphic

organizers• Semantic feature

analysis

Step 4: Make it Personal: Individual Activities

Challenges to Independent Work

• 28% of high school teachers “often or very often” run out of time in class and assign the content for homework (MetLife, 2008)

• Should follow modeling, guided practice, and collaborative work with peers (Fisher & Frey, 2008)

Independent Learning of Vocabulary

• Integration of schema with a focus on sets of relationships

• Repetition through repeated opportunities to encounter words in speech, reading, and writing

• Meaningful use of the words in authentic events (Nagy, 1988)

Step 5: Make it a Priority: Creating a Schoolwide

Focus

Why Go Schoolwide?• Schoolwide focus is one of the most

important actions a middle or high school can take to improve achievement (Langer, 2001; Reeves, 2000)

• Focus on literacy schoolwide leads to long-term improvement in climate, achievement (Fisher, Frey, & Williams, 2002)

Two Schoolwide Initiatives• Words of the Week

(WOW Words) to focus on “SAT words”

• Wide reading to build background, increase exposure, and foster interest in reading

Words of the Week

• Five words a week (Fid, Fi: to trust)– Affidavit, confidant, defiant, fidelity, infidel

• Grouped by affix or derivation

• Departments propose words

• Goal is to build vocabulary and teach patterns for unfamiliar words

• Introduced in English classes

Incidental Learning Through Wide Reading

• Cumulative effect of reading: 60 minutes per day x 5 days a week= 2,250,000 words per year

• 2,250 words learned per year this way (Mason, Stahl, Au, & Herman, 2003)

A bargain, considering that only 300-500 words can be directly taught

each year

Who benefits? How?• Text must be at independent

level (you can’t learn from books you can’t read)

• Older readers learn more words than younger readers

• Stronger readers learn more words than struggling readers

• The words they are likely to learn are those they know a little bit about

8 Factors for SSR• Access• Appeal• Environment• Encouragement• Staff training• Non-accountability• Follow-up activities• Distributed time to readPilgreen, J. (2000). The sustained silent reading handbook. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann

Independent Reading in Content Classes

• Choice

• Relevance

• Differentiation

Lessons Learned: Professional Growth

Sustaining the Effort• Learn with and from colleagues• Develop a professional library on vocabulary

development• Ensure that classrooms have a a range of

resources

Learning Words Inside and Outside

When our teaching is at its best, our students take what they’ve learned inside our classrooms to their outside lives. Vocabulary doesn’t exist between the school bells—it is carried with each learner for the rest of their lives.