Week 7 Assignment 3: Teaching Word Study

There are three levels of words:

The first, are the familiar words that we have lots of exposure to. These words don’t need to be taught since they are common and used in everyday language and reading.

The second category of words are those words that appear often enough in print or daily conversations yet need to be taught explicitly, such as: freeway, democracy, hurricane. The teacher can focus on these words during a vocabulary lesson, or introduce them while chancing upon them during reading time. The teacher’s focal point should be words that fall under this category.

The third level, are highly technical words that are unique to a specific subject such as chemistry or biology. Odds are that the students will learn these words when learning the subject they pertain to, so it is unnecessary for teachers to spend time teaching these words.

Students should be taught the chunking strategy to use when they encounter a difficult word. As Professor Allington explains, at first they should be trained to tear words apart, then learn to use their thumbs to cover up half the word, and eventually they can read words independently without using their thumbs. During guided or independent reading the teacher can model how to properly chunk words to accurately decode them. The more exposure children have to common onset rime patterns, the more likely they are to recognize them in the future.

Ideally, every teacher should draw words from the material they are dealing with which will improve the students’ vocabulary and comprehension. A great way to foster word study is to encourage students to try to use context clues to figure out the meaning of a hard word. In the video, the student uses a personal example to describe to his teacher the meaning of the word “contention”. I too, would invite my students to share personal experiences related to the new vocabulary word, this way they are more likely to remember the word and use it properly in the future.