The One About Vocabulary
On vocabulary's role in reading development
Dear Reader,
Last summer, I read Dr. Daniel Willingham’s Why Kids Don’t Like School, which is a book about the disconnect between how kids learn and how schools teach. It’s a provocative title, especially since the text itself doesn’t traffic in certain romantic notions about childhood or education. Willingham’s thesis is surprisingly dry: if kids are taught in a way where they learn more, then they will like school more.
It’s a refreshing book because it doesn’t come from within the bubble of K-12 education but rather from someone whose academic career is studying how people learn. This difference in context leads Willingham to state ideas in stark language that is uncommon in most educational materials. There is one sentence in particular that has stayed with me:
“Understanding is remembering in disguise.”
Initially, after years of training with Bloom’s Taxonomy and Webb’s Depths of Knowledge, I was taken aback. Remembering and recalling are consistently rated as low-level skills while inferencing and synthesizing are held up as the ultimate goals in a lesson. The latter are given primary consideration when planning instruction, while the former are seen as less important checkpoints. Yet Willingham wrinkles this relationship. Recollection of facts and knowledge are not just minor prerequisites but essential components of inferential and synthetic thinking. We do children a disservice when we skip over the factual knowledge in our lessons, especially when we talk about literacy.
Last week’s newsletter explored the word recognition strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope. This week, I’m going to talk about vocabulary. Willingham’s insight about memory and understanding will prove crucial to grasping why vocabulary development is essential to literacy, especially early literacy.
And with that, I wish you all the happiest of Mondays.
Sincerely,
Erin
Some Vocabulary About Vocabulary
To make an obvious point, there are too many words in the English language (in all languages, for that matter,) and it would be silly for a school to attempt to teach every single one.
Before we talk about the role vocabulary plays in literacy, let’s define some common terms. Vocabulary is often talked about in tiers, which organizes all the words in language into three broad categories.
Tier 1 Words - These are everyday words like dog, is, was, that, so, but, home, walk. These are words that most language speakers just know. They don’t need to be defined or explained.
Tier 2 Words - Tier 2 words are sometimes referred to as “adult words,” meaning they are the kinds of words heard more frequently in adult conversation. The issue with this definition is that different groups of adults commonly use different words. I think it is more helpful to think of Tier 2 words as the words found in literature and newspapers. Think about words like generous, arrogant, benevolent, suspicious. These are words that adults tend to be much more familiar with than children.
Tier 3 Words - Now these are the discipline-specific words that are not commonly used beyond their specific domain. Think about epistemology in philosophy or mantle plumes in geology. These are words you may or may not be familiar with, depending on your knowledge of the field. Now at different levels of schooling, children will be expected to acquire domain knowledge in subjects like science and history, and they will learn Tier 3 words in the process.
These categories, especially Tier 2, contain myriad sub-categories when thinking about words. And the truth is, most words are not learned through explicit instruction in school. To make an obvious point, there are too many words in the English language (in all languages, for that matter,) and it would be silly for a school to attempt to teach every single one.
Luckily, most if not all Tier 1 words are learned through early oral language experiences, which is so important for the youngest of children to engage in conversations with adults. These verbal opportunities also allow for children to begin learning some Tier 2 and 3 words. (Little kids love talking about dinosaurs and trains, and they will learn a lot of domain-specific words in the process!) Oral engagement is an effective and crucial lever to support early vocabulary development.
Vocabulary and Comprehension
The more vocabulary children learn, the better they can understand and make sense of the texts they read.
Even though children will learn quite a lot through oral language, they will certainly not learn all the words they need to read and understand a variety of texts through verbal interactions alone. Consider this excerpt from Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes, a text often read in early elementary school:
I wish I could go home, thought Chrysanthemum miserably.
“Welcome home,” said her mother.
“Welcome home,” said her father.
“School is no place for me,” said Chrysanthemum. “My name is too long. It scarcely fits on my nametag. And I’m named after a flower.”
“Oh pish,” said her mother. “Your name is beautiful.”
“And precious, and fascinating, and priceless, and winsome,” said her father.
For a book usually read to five, six, and seven year olds, there are a good number of Tier 2 words. Miserably, scarcely, precious, fascinating, priceless, winsome. Not to mention the fact that students may not even know what a chrysanthemum is before reading the book!
The cause is not hopeless. Teachers can pre-teach a few of the vocabulary words that are essential for comprehension of a text. The word “miserably” is used several times through Chrysanthemum, so it would be a helpful word to pre-teach a kindergarten class before reading the book. A word like “winsome” is only used once, so a teacher could drop-in the following as they read: “Winsome - that means he thinks her name is pretty.”
Margaret McKeown of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh gave a fabulous presentation to the Swedish Dyslexia Association, which includes a number of specific instructional recommendations for teaching vocabulary. Even though children need vocabulary instruction, they don’t need to drudge through long worksheets with twenty-odd words every week. Vocabulary can be taught based on the curriculum. What are the texts students will be reading? What are the words they will need to know in order to access the ideas in a text? The answers to these questions will help teachers select a set of words that they can then explicitly teach and practice with their students.
The more vocabulary children learn, the better they can understand and make sense of the texts they read. The more texts they can read and understand, the more new words they will encounter and implicitly determine the meanings of. This leads us to the phenomena known as the Matthew Effect.
The Matthew Effect
The big idea is that the more reading students are doing, the more words they will encounter and learn.
The Matthew Effect is a reference to a famous Percy Shelley quote, “The rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer,” which in turn is a biblical reference to the parable of the talents in the Book of Matthew.
Putting aside the ancestry of the word, The Matthew Effect refers to an observed phenomena in reading research. Keith Stanovich of Oakland University was the first one to propose it in 1986, arguing that differences between struggling and high-achieving readings compound over time; in particular, children who mastered foundational reading skills continued to learn more and more words, which indicated precipitous reading growth, while struggling readers continued to struggle and learned substantially fewer words.
In 2015, researchers from the University of Iowa and Florida State followed 485 students from kindergarten to tenth grade. They were specifically investigating the relationship between early word reading skills and vocabulary knowledge later in life. The researchers found a relationship between fourth grade performance on a word reading assessment and vocabulary knowledge in tenth grade, though the researchers were careful to say that the fourth grade assessment should be thought of as a stand in for many different kinds of reading activities, such as independent reading. The big idea is that the more reading students are doing, the more words they will encounter and learn. This specific study does not fully address the relationship between those activities and vocabulary development though.
Let’s take a closer look at one of the conclusions of the study.
“The second question of this study was whether the relationship between reading skill and vocabulary growth was the same for both strong and weak readers. Indeed, further examination of the data revealed that the effect of early word-reading ability on vocabulary was not uniform across different levels of initial word-reading ability. Instead, it would appear that the strong readers made greater vocabulary gains relative to the average and weak readers. In the language of the Matthew effect, the rich were getting richer due to their better reading, but the poor were not getting poorer due to their weak reading.”
So they found a Matthew Effect for the strongest readers, where vocabulary knowledge compounded over time, while average and weak readers tended to grow at a much slower rate, though they weren’t necessarily becoming “poorer” at reading or vocabulary -- they simply were not accumulating words the way stronger readers were.
This is a hopeful note! It may be possible for schools to provide interventions to help average and weaker readers improve their vocabularies, such as adjusting instruction or instilling habits of reading that foster vocabulary expansion.
Conclusion
Vocabulary development is one way of describing knowledge building, which is what children (and adults) do when they read extensively.
Understanding is remembering in disguise.
I want to conclude with this Willingham quote, which concisely articulates the value of expanding vocabulary. For readers, especially novice readers, comprehension of a text is impossible without comprehension of vocabulary. We praise children for making inferences about an author’s lesson or the motivation of a character, but they simply cannot do any of that highly praised thinking without also making sense of the words on the page.
When a child reads about a character sobbing on a bench and determines that the character feels miserable, they are not creating a new idea; rather, the child is remembering the definition of miserable and realizing that the very sad character is another example of misery. It’s not that the child is wrong or doesn’t have a correct idea, but that the child is engaged in recollecting just as much as they are engaged in inferencing.
Of course, the child might also learn about misery in a new way. They see a character described as miserable on the inside, who conceals their misery by performing their daily routines with phony pep. All of a sudden, the child realizes that their prior experience with miserableness is incomplete -- it’s a feeling that isn’t always detectable to an outside observer. Once again, the student is creating a tree of knowledge around the word misery, which will inevitably deepen their use and understanding of it in the future.
Vocabulary development is one way of describing knowledge building, which is what children (and adults) do when they read extensively. But children will not and cannot read extensively if they are unable to fluently and confidently decode the words on the page, which was the subject of last week’s newsletter. Even if they can decode miserable or generous or concentrate, it won’t matter if they don’t know the meanings behind the words.
Next week, I’ll talk a little bit more about knowledge building and its role in literacy instruction.
Extra Credit
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” - Jorge Luis Borges
Check out this special report from EdWeek last year on school districts focused on vocabulary and background knowledge in their elementary schools.
Memorable Quote: “In this week’s kindergarten class, one of those words was “living room.” Palmer had introduced the word earlier that week—a lot of her students didn’t have a space in their homes that they called by that name. In this day’s lesson, she asked students to recall it, asking questions: What kind of room has a couch? A chair? Matthews is in a small, rural county, where the majority of students receive free and reduced-price lunch. Hanlin said that a lot of books, even for young readers, assume life experience her students don’t have. So teachers build on the knowledge that students do have. For example, Hanlin said, students might not know the word “cathedral.” But they do know the word “church.”