Learning Blog 5

I really enjoyed Chapter 5 of our book, Reading to Learn in the Content Areas, about teaching vocabulary. I definitely think it is important to know how vocabulary impacts all subject areas. Each subject will have its own vocabulary and key concepts that student should know, not just for reading and writing. One of my favorite quotes from the book was “a strong vocabulary equips students to actively participate in society as educated citizens and informed consumers” (169). Which made me realize how important knowing and understand vocabulary truly impacts comprehension and can impact how the students interact with the world around them. Understanding vocabulary is very essential to reading comprehension. As teachers, we cannot assume that the students always understand the material they are reading.  If they do not know the meanings of the key vocabulary and concepts in a passage, they will have difficulty understanding the passage.

The text talks about the two different types of vocabulary, Content-specific vocabulary and academic vocabulary. Content specific vocabulary relates to the critical terms in a specific content area. While academic vocabulary is a set of terms often found among many expository texts and speeches but are not unique to any specific content area or academic discipline.  When I think of academic vocabulary, I think of words that students see frequently but might not know their meaning.  As a teacher I definitely think both types are very important for our student to develop good reading comprehension skills and help them be able to comprehend a very wide range of different texts.

Word knowledge in terms of vocabulary can be confusing for students. The example in the book of “John took a plane” (170), is a great example of how it could be confusing because it could have many different meanings depending on how the student interprets the sentence, so for the students knowing how to recognize a word and actually know what the word means takes practice that comes with being taught effective comprehension skills, and being able to apply them no matter what text they are reading. One of the quotes from the book that really hit me was “Word knowledge is not static, but rather dynamic—changing and growing over time as a learner experiences, hears, and reads a word in a variety of places and circumstances” (170). I want my future classroom to be a text-rich environment, in which my students will receive direct instruction as well as multiple exposures to many different forms of text.

This chapter does a great job of presenting many different effective strategies for teaching vocabulary in each phase of the PAR Lesson Framework that I can use in my future classroom such as context clue discovery, word inventories, the Toast strategy and the Dissect strategy. As a future elementary school teacher I really liked the Toast and the Dissect strategies because I think they will be a great tool for younger readers to understand vocabulary. Overall I definitely think learning vocabulary is very critical to developing and improving reading comprehension and understanding for the students across all content areas. But without a solid foundation and purpose there is little chance of meaningful instruction taking place. I think the books says it best “Just as  house needs a strong foundation, so reading comprehension depends on a strong base of oral language and concept development” (171). By giving students that base in the prep stage and clarifying in the assistance phase and deriving more meaning in the reflection stage, they are building skills they are necessary across all content areas and will help them develop more in depth understanding from what they read.