Connecting with each other: Whakawhanaungatanga and Homework Feedback – Breakout Groups
Teachers in my breakout group have been doing a variety of learning activities. As we talked, people began to realise that vocabulary is a bigger part of our teaching than we really recognised. Part of our homework was sharing vocabulary activities which we use. I shared the vocabulary.com site which I use extensively with my Year 10 classes to pre-teach key vocabulary for whichever book we are reading. This is a free vocabulary learning website which includes options for including spelling, questions to reinforce previous lists, and ‘vocab jams’. Students enjoy the competitive/gaming aspect of the site. I have noticed that the most academic students really thrive with it and compete on the leaderboard, it is less successful with the lower abilitiy students, who struggle because they don’t want to use the hints and ‘lose points’. While it is not a complete answer to vocabulary learning, it is one tool in the box, and it is easy to use. There are many pre-made lists, or you can create your own, as I have. I have created vocab lists for the book we are reading (the Holocaust Memoir ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel) but there are also many lists created by other teachers which you can search and use. For example, I found existing lists when I was teaching The Hunger Games. You can create as many classes and groups as you like, using a joining code. Disadvantage: it’s an American site with American spelling. I hate to say it, but I have reached the point where I can live with that!
Connecting with Manaiakalani: Dorothy – Manaiakalani Kaupapa and Shared Pedagogy: Vocabulary (& Decoding)
Dorothy began with focussing on the ‘why’ of teaching vocabulary. A robust vocabulary improves all forms of communication: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It is one of the keys to a successful life. Size does matter here, both breadth and depth of vocabulary. Research shows that Decile 1 children have heard 30 million fewer words than a Decile 10 child when they start school. This is an area where we can definitely make a difference. Dorothy talked about the Welcome to School project – a study conducted by Manaiakalani and Starship Hospital – 120 children were assessed over a 12 month period. This study confirmed the international research regarding the gap between vocabulary, letter recognition etc between children from high and low socio-economic areas, showing that the same factors are at work in Aotearoa.
Dorothy mentioned some of the digital tools available to support vocabulary teaching, such as Word Wall. This does cost, and she mentioned that many of the functions on it can be duplicated by ChatGPT. She also pointed out that there are many functionalities within Google Docs which can be used to enhance vocabulary teaching with digital text.
Chalk & Talk: Naomi – Background to Vocabulary Instruction
We are teaching learners to think and question, and vocabulary is key to empowering our students to do that. We need to be sure we build active vocabulary, not just passive.
Naomi asked us to rate ourselves out of 5 for whether we use the following:
- Pre-reading activity
- Independent follow-up
- Small group reading intro
- Making target words visible
- During small group reading
I could give myself 3 out of 5: I am only just starting to use small groups and don’t yet have a pre-reading vocabulary routine for that (though I do for our whole-class text), and I am not necessarily making target words visible either in the text or in the classroom displays.
Naomi explained that by Year 5, 70% of reading problems are related to vocabulary – this is a pretty sobering statistic and makes me realise that vocabulary is even more important than I had realised.
Naomi used a Word Knowledge Organiser to assess our knowledge of terms related to vocabulary teaching. This was really quick and gives a great overview to the teacher of which terms students are going to need more teaching on. I really liked this tool and can see myself using it with my senior classes as a pre-reading activity.
Seven exposures to a word will result in the brain starting to put it into long-term memory. However, it does need to be revisited for it to be retained.
We also need to expose students to the multiple meanings of words, depending on context.
We know that many learners take in vocabulary implicitly – from reading and listening – but there are many learners who don’t have that exposure, and we need to explicitly teach them vocabulary. We also need to expose them to it repeatedly and help them to use it actively rather than just understand it passively – extended mapping, rather than fast mapping.
We went into breakout groups to discuss the extent to which we use the four elements of explicit vocabulary teaching in our practice.
In our discussion, we built on the Ground Rules for Talk we had used previously, by using specific roles of Initiator and Builder within the group. I thought these roles were quite useful. We reached consensus in the group that we have all used the four elements in our teaching at different times, but probably not extensively or often even necessarily consciously.
Chalk & Talk: Janet – Word Consciousness
Word consciousness is an interest in and awareness of words, something we definitely want to encourage in our students.
Word displays in the classroom are a good way to build tier 3 (subject-specific) vocabulary. Another way to build curiosity about words is using rebus puzzles. There are a number of rebus generators available on line, as well as collections of existing rebus puzzles, such as the ESL Vault.
Deep Dive: Naomi – Explicit, Robust Interactive Vocabulary Learning Opportunities
Beck, McKeown et al – 5 Principles of robust vocabulary instruction:
- Direct explanation (in a learner-friendly way)
- Thought-provoking connections to meanings in students’ lived experiences
- Playful use of words (e.g. word consciousness)
- Interactive engagement
- Follow-up (multiple encounters)
Tier 2 words are highly suitable for explicit vocabulary instruction because they are found infrequently in conversation, are high utility (crossing a variety of domains/contexts), and have a powerful impact on communication. Students need to acquire a robust knowledge of around 700 words per year.
If you present students with a difficult text and don’t front load the essential vocabulary, then the lexical bar will be too high – the text will not be comprehensible for the students.
We went into breakout groups and practised identifying Tier 2 vocabulary. In a futher buddy activity we acted as students completing some vocabulary activities.
Model & Master: Janet – Design and Share Resources
In this session we looked in greater depth at the vocabulary activities we had been trialling, and created an example of our own using one of these four examples:
I will be teaching the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with my Year 10s, so I designed this activity using the word associations example to teach some key vocabulary.
Strategy Builder: Kiri – Teaching Questioning
Kiri looked at teaching questioning strategies to enhance comprehension. She shared frameworks such as the QAR (Question Answer Relationships) model and Reciprocal Teaching.
Chalk & Talk: Janet – Morphology
Janet explored morphology’s significance in teaching academic vocabulary across disciplines. She explained morphological awareness benefits decoding, spelling, and comprehension, especially for tier two and three vocabulary. One great resource Janet shared was this pdf of Morpheme Matrices which are ready to use.
Deep Dive: Naomi – Pulling it all together
Naomi summarised the day including:
- the four elements of explicit vocabulary teaching
- 5 Principles of robust vocabulary instruction
- examples of classroom displays
- decoding strategies and morphology
She then challenged us to consider how we could incorporate explicit vocabulary teaching into our learning programmes for next term.
Day 6 – Vocabulary (& Decoding) Reflection:
I really enjoyed today, probably because I was more inside my comfort zone with words, language, morphology, etymology, etc, being a bit of a language nerd.
Key takeaways from today for me were:
- the reminder from Dorothy about the huge vocabulary gap which many of my students have when they arrive at school
- reassurance that I actually do know how to teach vocabulary and I do it all the time
- some really practical teaching resources such as the four models shared by Janet, which we used to design a resource of our own
- the morpheme matrices – again, a ready to use resource that will help me teach word structure explicitly
Looking ahead, over the next two weeks I will be frantically trying to tie up my ‘Night’ unit with my Year 10 Humanities class, as their semester only goes to the end of the term. I will try to do some limited vocabulary activities with this class around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I somehow have to ‘cover’ in the next two weeks along with finishing reading ‘Night’.
Next term, my new Year 10 Humanities semester course (and class) will be focussed on the topic of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. While a film study will be a major part of this, I also want to use a number of short non-fiction and fiction texts about VR, AI and gaming. This topic will lend itself really well to the critical thinking focus in the RPI course next term.
For our homework this time, we need to implement at least two vocabulary activities, one should be the activity we designed in Janet’s resource design session, and then one other activity introduced today. Preferably, this should be done in the next two weeks.
We also need to bring along a text we might use next term with a critical literacy theme. I am quite excited about this as I have such a great topic for discussion next term.