I was excited to find Jago used Edgar Allan Poe in this chapter because that is who I have to complete the twenty instructional ideas for our class wiki, although I will not use any of the strategies she talks about because we will have all read them by then, plus there are a ton available on the web.
She reiterates something that I think we have been discussing a lot in our classes: words! I recently read an article talking about how boys lag behind in developing their vocabulary and because of that they have more behavior problems. Jago says, "Vocabulary experts tell us that for reasonable reading comprehension a student needs to know 90-95 percent of the words" (Jago 22). This makes sense because how are students supposed to be able to comprehend a text if they don't know a majority of the words. One thing that I think is decreasing the amount of words students know is the lack of dictionaries available. I can remember working in dictionaries and regularly looking up words; now I rarely see dictionaries in every classroom. Perhaps teachers rely on digital forms of dictionaries, but that could keep them in hiding and deter students from looking up unknown words.
We all went through those classes where every week you got your new list of vocabulary words on Monday, turned in using them in a sentence on Tuesday and on Friday you had a test over them. A lot of those words I memorized for the test and haven't used them since. We had the occasional word searches too. If you read the chart on "what to do" and "what not to do" on page 32, then you will see everything I just mentioned is in the "Don't do" section. We need to teach words that students are going to remember and are going to use again, not leave them behind after the quiz. Jago identifies three criteria for choosing words. The first one is importance and utility. Pick words that the students will see reoccuringly throughout many of their classes. The second criterion is instructional potential. Pick either words that have more than one way of being used or can be used to modify different types of words, so students can use them interchangeably. The last criterion is conceptual understanding. Use words that students understand but are concise in meaning and make a clear description when being used. Those three criteria are on page 28. Picking words for students to understand is crucial to their learning and following those three criteria might ease the burden of teaching student's new words.
I really liked the chart on page 32 also. I know that it will be a great reference to have once I start teaching. I also think we shouldn't use obscure words that are never mentioned again. I think we should challenge students but also use words that fall under that criteria.
ReplyDeleteI agree, the chart is a good reference. Unfortunately, too many times students are taught vocabulary with the following routine: memorize, write, test.
ReplyDeleteI love this chart! I mentioned it in my posting as well. I think that by making your own vocabulary lists and using suffixes and prefixes when applicable will help them understand. Also, you are choosing your own words to learn, so if you already knew some, you won't have to bother writing about them or learning about them again.
ReplyDeleteI think many times teachers just don't know how to teach vocab, and the only way they were taught were by vocab lists. However, as you mentioned I don't remember any of those words after the test. I think this chapter helped a lot when thinking about how to teach vocab. I thought it was important that students present words they found difficult, instead of the teacher handing them a list of words on Monday. I also agree that a lack of dictionaries is a problem.Whenever there is a word I don't know, I always look it up. However, I have never heard of a digital dictionary. That is exciting, I am going to have to look more into that.
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