Thursday, February 14, 2008
Time to cause some vocabulary controversy
I was looking back at the section in the textbook on teaching vocabulary. Now I know I'm going to start some controversy on this, but I have to say it (maybe because I like to cause some intellectual debates in my classes). Do we really need all of these fancy, all-out methods of teaching vocabulary? Having word meaning graphic organizers, vocabulary trees, and other methods sound nice; but are they really needed? If I was a high school student, heck even today as an adult, and I was given the task of making a word meaning graphic organizer for some words, I would laugh and just take a zero. Who needs all of that work? Do we really need to have kids figure out the prefix and suffix, the etymology of the word, examples of where the word is found and other such tasks? I think our motives are fantastic. Yes, we need to increase students' vocabulary skills. However, is this the way to go? Does this really work or is it teaching students that vocabulary is a pain? Granted, giving words and definitions and then quizzing them does not work either. They memorize the words five minutes before the quiz and then forget them 30 seconds after the quiz. However, there has to be a happy medium. As soon as I figure it out, I'll write a book and become rich. Until then, anyone have any great ideas for teaching vocabulary?
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This is the one thing I think I do well, but I put a lot of time into it though and our "pacing guides" have always made vocabulary a 10% portion of language arts. Still, there is so much more a student can accomplish if they know more words. The key is to use those words and make them a part of the lexicon of your classroom. We laugh, toil, and practice over those words until they "stick." I am not a big fan of "stems" and I bite my tongue when reviewing them with my own children, but every now and then a student figures out a word because he remembers some part of it; more often, though, a students knows a word because he's heard it used before. So, I figure that's the best way to teach them: use them--and use them A LOT.
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