Vocabulary Instruction

During the 13 years I spent in the public school system in Washington state I was exposed to many different styles of vocabulary instruction. Most of the time we were studying a section in the textbook and at the beginning of the chapter was found a list of vocabulary words that were used throughout the chapter. We would study the definitions of those words, have a test on the words, and be expected to know the words as we worked through the chapter of the text book. During my high school years, teachers would give us a more extensive list of vocabulary words to know and we would be required to create flash cards using those words which would provide us with a study aid. During my 11th grade year, our teacher had us memorize Latin root words during the summer before we entered her class and we were tested on those words for the first day of class. Our teacher explained to us that by knowing those root words we would be provided with clues that would help us recognize the definition of other words that use those roots. Below is found the link to a PDF file that lists common latin root words, the meaning of that word, and examples where that root word is used.

http://www.uhv.edu/StudentSuccessCenter/study/pdf/building.vocab.roots.pdf  

Having these root words memorized helped us all a lot as we were exposed to more vocabulary words throughout the year. Our teacher would have us learn 7-10 new vocab words each week. The words she would have us memorize were pulled from a list of common words found on the SAT that many students did not know the meaning of. Her main focus throughout the entire year was to help us prepare for the SAT and the AP English tests. Each week we would find a definition for each word, draw a picture of the word that would help us remember it, and use the word in a sentence. We would then be tested on these words at the end of the week. She didn't expose us to these words in the most interesting or innovative ways, but she provided us with enough exposure to these words to help us cement the meaning of these words into our minds. These words were never directly related to core concepts of the class, but after having learned these words I would run across these words and remember the meaning due to the way in which we had learned.

There are some elements of my teacher's strategies that I would want to implement in the classroom, but I mostly want to build off of her strategies. I want to help my student learn the Latin roots, affixes, and suffixes in order to provide students with context clues that can help students understand the meaning of other words. I want to come up with ways in which students can get out of their seats, move around the classroom, and build kinesthetic and sensory ways in which students can learn and memorize these words. I would like to help students learn vocab words that are directly related to the core concepts of what we are learning in the unit.

Having learned new strategies of teaching vocabulary has helped a lot. Students can learn vocab words through games, drawing pictures, and making charts. My only concern is deciding what specific vocabulary words I should focus on in English classes because that content is so broad. Should I focus on literary terms, words that students have struggled with in the text we are working with, or words for a list of words found on a standardized test? With Psychology I know that I will be able to focus on words that we are learning in conjunction with the specific unit.

Comprehension Instruction 

It is easy to find text within my content area of English, but the hard part is sorting out the effective and non-effective texts and finding literature that will interest the students and keep them engaged in learning activities. The typical texts of my discipline include short stories, novels, historical fiction, poems, news articles, and non-fiction, plays, as well as many other types of texts. Throughout my middles and high school years we mostly focused on novels and short stories. We read novels such as The Hobbit, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird. We also read several short stories and we acted out a play from Shakespeare once a year. I had the same English teacher for 9th and 10th grade and she would always show us at least one movie based on the text we had just read.

My teachers throughout middle and high school mostly helped us understand the main storyline of the text. We had study guide questions, whole class discussions, and learned new vocabulary words from each specific text. We usually went no further than a overall understanding of what the text was about. My 9th/10th grade Language Arts teacher had daily routines that would motivate us to be on-track with our reading. Everyday she would have a question about the reading and ask one student to answer the question and elaborate on the hidden meaning of the specific part of the text. She pre-selected the student each day but never told us when our specific day would be in order to keep us motivated to do our homework.

It wasn't until 11th grade that I had a teacher who pushed me to think deeper into the reading by analyzing the author's style and purpose of writing. She helped the class engage in a variety of texts each week. Every Monday we read an article or a speech and we analyzed that piece of text until there was nothing left to analyze! We were required to point out allusions, understatements, metaphors, juxtapositions, and any other literary terms we could think of. We had to write our analysis of the text and describe our hypothesis of why the author wrote using the style he did, if there was a deeper meaning to the text, how this text must have influenced people during that time period, and what the overall purpose of the text was. We read novels that had a deeper social meaning and she helped us understand the deeper meaning by requiring us to participate in socratic circles and have whole group discussions.

After talking about comprehension strategies in this class, I realized that my 11th grade English teacher used many of these strategies. One strategy in particular that I remember her using was an anticipation guide. She called it "walk up to the line". My teacher would ask a question (usually a simple or silly question to get us started) and we would walk up to the line if we agreed or if we related to the question or statement. This would get us thinking about some of the hidden social meanings of the text we were reading and it also helped us to see how the issues we were reading about applied to events that were currently happening. It also helped us see how similar we were to peers that we usually didn't associate with and it helped us develop our own opinions.

If I were to replicate the practices of one of my teachers I would replicate my 11th grade English teacher. I want to use different strategies everyday so that students won't be stuck in a mindless routine. I want to help the students stay active and engaged in the activities and I want them to be able to focus on the purpose of a text and the deeper meaning as well as how a text can be applied to current events. I don't want to be the "movie day teacher" or the teacher who instills fear into the hearts of my students in order to motivate them to keep up with the reading.