WEBVTT

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My name is Mary Beth Curtis.

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I'm a Professor of Education here at Lesley university,

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where I also direct the Center for Special Education.

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For the past 30 years or so, my research and clinical work has focused on how reading develops

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and what fails to develop or develops differently when students have difficulty with reading.

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And over the past couple of years, I've been working with students who are at risk

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for reading failure and, as a consequence, at risk for dropping out of school.

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And in looking at those students and trying to figure out what sorts of things they were good at

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and what sorts of things they were having difficulty with,

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we were struck in our testing by how many of those students had difficulty in vocabulary.

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When we think about why explicit vocabulary instruction is important for adolescence

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and important for teachers of students of adolescence,

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whether they be English Language Arts teachers or content area teachers,

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I always go back to the relationship between vocabulary and comprehension.

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Vocabulary is also a consequence of how well you comprehend.

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If you're a good comprehender, you're going to have lots of opportunities

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to learn new word meanings from context.

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But if you're having difficulty in comprehending,

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you're going to have a really hard time learning those word meanings on your own.

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Direct and explicit vocabulary instruction is certainly the first principle

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that the research supports.

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It's particularly important when you're working with students who are learning new vocabulary

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that they have the opportunity to have the information explained to them directly,

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to have opportunities then to apply that information guided by their teachers,

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and then finally opportunities to apply it independently.

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Another principle that we want to make sure that we incorporate

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in our vocabulary instruction is multiple opportunities to learn the new word meanings

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or the vocabulary skills that we're teaching.

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In addition to these multiple encounters,

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we want to make sure that these multiple encounters are occurring in varied contexts.

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An example I can think of is a student,

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I asked him if he knew what "desist" meant, and he said, "Yeah."

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He said, "My high school teacher says that,

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'cease and desist.'" And I said then, "Okay, what does it mean?"

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He says, "Well, I think it means sit down, shut up, and pay attention."

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Then finally, in addition to direct and explicit instruction,

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multiple opportunities in varied contexts,

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we want to make sure that the tasks that we give students to learn vocabulary with

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and vocabulary skills are very active and generative tasks-that they really have a chance

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to work with the information, that they're not just sitting there and receiving it

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as empty vessels, but they have a chance to work with it.

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And so ways that we can help students to work with this information include discussions,

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include writing activities, include graphic organizers when they're filling out the information.

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The key to it is to make sure that there are many right answers,

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that students know that there is no one way to respond in these tasks.

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And the research supports that as being a very effective way to teach vocabulary.

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When we think about why it's important for subject area teachers

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to provide explicit vocabulary instruction, it often helps to think about the kinds

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of vocabulary words that are out there.

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Researchers often distinguish between conversational vocabulary and academic vocabulary.

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Conversational vocabulary is oral vocabulary.

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It's the kinds of things that refer to concrete things out there

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that we discuss on an everyday basis.

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Academic vocabulary is written vocabulary.

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It's vocabulary that we learn through schooling,

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and it's the kind of thing that content area teachers have to teach when they teach their areas,

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and it tends to be more abstract than conversational vocabulary.

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Academic vocabulary, really, we can think of as two different kinds as well.

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There are these words that people have called brick words and there are words

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that they've called mortar words.

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And the brick words are the key concepts in the academic area.

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so, if we were teaching the different kinds of muscles or something like that,

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there would be skeletal muscles; there would be cardiac muscles; there would be smooth muscles.

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Those are really the brick vocabulary words when you are thinking about muscles.

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But there are also these mortar words that you have to know

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in order to understand the brick words.

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so, if I was talking about muscles, I would need to know words like "functions"

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because those different muscles have different functions.

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I would need to know the word "characteristics"

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because those muscles have different characteristics.

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The researchers Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown have brought all of those notions together

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when they've talked about word tiers.

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They talked about three different word tiers.

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And tier one are these words that are basic vocabulary words.

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They're words that occur in oral language, and they tend to be words that most middle school

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and high school students know the meanings of.

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They're words like "baby," and "store," and "bus," and "car," and things like that.

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And then, there are these tier three words at the very opposite end.

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And the tier three words are the domain-specific words.

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Those are the ones that content area teachers want to teach; that's their content.

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They're things like "isotope," and "peninsula," and "quadratic," and those sorts of words.

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And then, in the middle there are these tier two words.

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And these tier two words are academic words, but they cut across the content areas.

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They're common to all those areas.

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And they're words like "characteristic," and "analyze," and "formulate," and things like that.

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Content area teachers, as I said, teach those tier three words, that's their content.

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But if students don't know these tier two words to kind of tie the content together,

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students are going to have difficulty in understanding the content.

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So, that why it's so important that content area teachers,

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as well as English Language Arts teachers, focus on teaching tier two and, if necessary,

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the tier one words so that students will then be able to understand the tier three words.

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When content area teachers are thinking about the ways

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in which they can help students understand the words not only that are part of the content

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but those vocabulary words that bind together the content,

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these tier two words that help students to understand their content,

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there's a number of things they can do.

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Teaching prefixes and suffixes and root words can be a wonderful way

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for content area teachers to help students.

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So many of the words in the content area come from Latin and Greek origins,

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and so it can be especially helpful to teach those within the content areas

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because that's where those words are occurring.

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Also, graphic organizers are a terrific way to help students in the content areas to understand,

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and showing students how the concepts that they are working on relate to concepts

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that are already familiar to them.

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There are so many words; we can only teach so many of them.

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There are so many skills.

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We can't teach them all, but we can get students engaged with words and meanings

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and to raise their consciousness about it.

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I was made particularly aware of this just a few days ago.

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some students were in a vocabulary class, and the teacher said, "We decided to take the day off

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and to watch the inauguration of the President."

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And so, the teacher and students watched the inauguration of President Obama,

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and the students got increasingly excited as they listened to the inauguration speech.

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And at the end of it, the teacher said, "Well, what did you think?"

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And the student said, "I can't believe it!"

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They were so excited.

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President Obama had used three of their vocabulary words

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in the inaugural address, now, how cool is that!