Ever assign some reading to your students only to realize later that they walked away with very little comprehension of it? If your answer is "no," then you and I need to meet. In person. As soon as possible. So I can learn all your secrets. But my guess is most of us would answer "yes" to this question. And this is really a dilemma, because reading needs to occur in basically every content area and in many, many walks of life. Numerous studies show us that a student's reading ability is directly related to academic success -- or failure.
Know what else a student's reading ability is directly related to? A knowledge of academic vocabulary. The following is a sample reading from Fisher and Frey's Word Wise & Content Rich in which the authors substituted in nonsense words so that we could get a feel for what it's like to read a text when we don't know just 5 percent of the words:
"Caffeine is tasteless. A 'strong' sjdkjdkj is mostly the result of the amount of coffee in relation to the amount of water. The longer a bean is ksjdksjd, the less caffeine it has. 'Arabica' beans have less caffeine than 'Robusta' beans. 'Arabica' beans have more flavor that 'Robusta' beans, which are mostly used in high-volume coffees and instant coffees. Djkjkefje is the way the bean is sjfkjfee, not the bean itself. You can use many different sjkjdkejds to produce sdjksjdk coffee. You can also use the ksdjksjds roasted coffee to make a larger cup of coffee. In the United States, skdjksj roasting results in a darker roast than kjdksjd roasting in Europe."
You can probably still figure some things out about this text even without knowing 5 percent of the words. I'm sure you all gleaned that the text is about coffee. But, you might have a difficult time answering questions about the meaning of the passage, right? Many of you probably have a decent amount of background knowledge about the subject matter, so you could use that schema to help you fill in some blanks. But imagine if you had limited background knowledge about the topic and didn't know the words. Enter incomprehension.
Here's some awesome news: as an educator, you can do something about this for your students. And I know, I know what some of you are thinking: "I do not have time to teach vocabulary. I have so many other things to cover in my content area! Please do not add this to my plate!" Never fear, readers. Fisher and Frey argue that we don't "need to hang up a banner that [says], 'Vocabulary Time.' Instead, [we can] incorporate vocabulary development seamlessly into [our] content teaching" (2008, p. 35).
(Now, unfortunately for you, readers, this post is a tad pre-mature. I just started reading the Fisher and Frey text this week, and am only about halfway through. So, my "how-to" examples will seem a bit scant. But they are great starting points, and I promise to share more later...Cross my heart...)
Here's one way to weave vocabulary instruction right into content instruction: teacher modeling. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- you cannot beat effective modeling when it comes to good instruction. This example is no different. Fisher and Frey provide a sample of a teacher modeling via a think aloud while working through a mathematics problem:
"I see that the innermost parentheses can't be reduced further. x + 1 is in the innermost, the most inside parentheses, and I know that I can't add terms that aren't alike. So next I look to the outside and need to distribute the eight across the terms inside the parentheses. By distribute, I don't mean pass out papers, I mean apply it across the terms, so inside the brackets, I would get (8x + 8) + 2."
Do you see how this teacher anticipated that students might get thrown off by the terms "innermost" and "distribute?" What's more, she didn't put a halt to the teaching of her content; she simply wove in a think aloud of the meanings of the terms.
Here's something I think is even more helpful: modeling what to do if you come across a word you don't know. (Now, some of you probably have some pretty amazing vocabularies, so every now and then you may need to pretend not to know some words in front of your students in order to pull off this kind of modeling. It's for the greater good, trust me!)
In reading a passage to his class, the teacher encounters a word he doesn't know and can model several ways he might go about solving this problem. He could model using the content clues of the surrounding words and sentences to guess at the meaning of the word, he could model breaking down the word into word parts like affixes to help him determine the meaning of the word. Or, he could model how to use resources to figure out the meaning of the word (like using a dictionary or asking a peer). The key is to allow your students to see these thought processes in action. And, again, the wonderful news is this can all be done in the midst of your content instruction. Vocabulary + content = the perfect pair!
(There are lots more ways to incorporate vocabulary instruction with content instruction, I promise. Just let me keep reading and researching for a little while longer, and I'll hit you up with the info. in a later post!)
No comments:
Post a Comment