4. Engage students periodically in activities that help them add to their knowledge of the terms in their vocabulary notebooks.
5. Periodically ask students to discuss the terms with one another.
6. Involve students periodically in games that allow them to play with terms.
The process is designed to be used with students of all ages and works equally well in self-contained classrooms (usually at the elementary level where one teacher teaches every subject) or in content-specific classes (as are usually used at the middle and high school levels). Teachers can devote as much or as little time to each step as they have available. As described previously, even surface-level knowledge of words is useful to students. Here, we describe and exemplify each step.
Step 1: Provide a Description, Explanation, or Example of the New Term
The first step involves providing a description, explanation, or example of the term for students. Before you can do that, however, you must determine what students already know. To verify this information, a teacher can simply ask, “What do you think you know about this term?” For example, an eighth-grade mathematics teacher asks students what they know about the term function. The students offer the following comments:
• A function is a kind of event. My mom organizes social functions for her ladies’ club.
• People often say that something “is a function of” something else. My dad says that “the quality of a meal is a function of how hungry you are.”
• A function is what a person does. My uncle functions as the president of our HOA.
• A function is arch-shaped. My brother graphs them on his calculator.
As students reply, the teacher listens for accurate knowledge as well as misconceptions. Accurate knowledge that students already have about a term can be incorporated into the teacher’s subsequent description and explanation of the term. If students have misconceptions about a term, the teacher can correct and clarify these in her explanation of the term. From the student comments, the teacher determines that students have accurate knowledge about different meanings attached to the term function (an event, a relationship, a role) and realizes that she needs to help them focus on the mathematical meaning of “a relationship between two measurements.” She also notes that some students understand that functions can be expressed visually by graphing them but recognizes the misconception that all functions’ graphs are arch-shaped. She decides to refer back to the second comment about “the quality of a meal being a function of how hungry you are” and build on it when she gives examples of different real-world situations expressed by functions.
Once the baseline for student understanding is set, the teacher can begin the six-step process by providing a description for the term.
Definition vs. Description
Providing students with information about a word’s meaning is an integral part of direct vocabulary instruction. Unfortunately, many teachers rely on dictionary definitions for this purpose. This practice is ineffective because the main goal of a dictionary definition is not necessarily to provide the clearest possible explanation for a word. In fact, Sidney Landau (1984) pointed out that one of the most important considerations when writing dictionary definitions is space. Definitions in dictionaries are typically designed to take up as little space as possible, in order to accommodate the large number of words that need to be included.
Additionally, dictionary definitions are designed using a classical structure that classifies, rather than explains, each concept. Stahl (1999) wrote, “There is a form for a definition, dating back to Aristotle, in which the definition first identifies which class (genus) the word belongs to, and then how that word differs from other members of its class (differentia)” (p. 17). For example, the DK Merriam-Webster Children’s Dictionary (2008) defines jeans as “pants [class] made of denim [differentiation]” (p. 450) and countdown as “the process [class] of subtracting the time remaining before an event [differentiation]” (p. 202). Because of this structure, Snow (1990) found that students’ ability to define words depended more on their understanding of the structure of a definition than on their actual understanding of a word.
Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan (2002) suggested that descriptions are more effective than definitions. Descriptions explain and exemplify words, often by using the words in sentences or explaining the contexts in which a word commonly appears. The Collins COBUILD Illustrated Basic Dictionary (Roehr & Carroll, 2010) represents one effort to supply students with descriptions rather than definitions. Table 2.1 illustrates the difference between descriptions found in the COBUILD dictionary and definitions from the DK children’s dictionary (2008).
Table 2.1: Descriptions vs. Definitions
| Definition in DK Merriam-Webster Children’s Dictionary (2008) | Description in Collins COBUILD Illustrated Basic Dictionary (Roehr & Carroll, 2010) | |
| abrupt | Happening without warning | An abrupt change or action is very sudden, often in a way that is unpleasant. |
| dignity | The quality or state of being worthy of honor and respect | If someone behaves or moves with dignity, they are serious, calm, and controlled. |
| inclined | Having a desire | If you say that you are inclined to have a particular opinion, you mean that you have this opinion, but you do not feel strongly about it. |
| overlook | To fail to see | If you overlook a fact or a problem, you do not notice it. |
| threat | The act of showing an intention to do harm | If you make a threat against someone, you say that something bad will happen to them if they do not do what you want. |
Descriptions, such as those shown in the right column of table 2.1, help students gain a clear understanding of what a word means and how it is generally used. Definitions, on the other hand, can often be confusing or lead students to infer incorrect meanings for words. For example, based solely on the dictionary definition for abrupt (from table 2.1) a student might compose sentences such as the following:
• Ben’s surprise party was abrupt.
• The clown jumped out of the cake abruptly.
• Ben’s abrupt gift of an Xbox 360 made all the children crowd around excitedly.
Technically, these sentences use the word abrupt to mean “happening without warning,” but they also show that this student has failed to capture the usually negative connotations associated with the word. The description in table 2.1 highlights that aspect of the word, explaining that abrupt actions or events can often be unpleasant.
Explaining Features of Words
Effective description and explanation of a term involve helping students understand the important features of a word. For example, a word’s part of speech (noun, verb, adverb, adjective,