Over the years, Kimberly has joined with teachers, principals, and administrators to improve literacy in readers of all ages. Through The Literacy Lens Audit®, a research-based literacy audit she developed, Kimberly guided literacy leaders in assessing and improving curriculum, instruction, environment, and student achievement across schools and districts. In addition, Kimberly has worked with educational organizations, such as the I-READ Department of Education literacy improvement program, and educational service centers. She has also supported statewide initiatives.
Kimberly earned her doctorate from the University of Missouri–Kansas City. She discovered her love of word learning and vocabulary when working with middle and high school students in several initiatives within Kansas City Public Schools. Since then, vocabulary improvement has been the focus of much of her work alongside educators in schools and districts across the United States.
Kimberly’s family includes two children, Taylor-Ruth and Corbin, and one rescue dog, Sally Girl. In her free time, she enjoys gardening, bicycling, knitting, and reading. To learn more about Kimberly’s work, visit www.kimberlytyson.com or follow @tysonkimberly on Twitter.
Angela B. Peery, EdD, is a consultant and author with three decades of experience as an educator. Since 2004, she has made more than one thousand presentations and has authored or co-authored eleven books. Angela has consulted with educators to improve teacher collaboration, formative assessment, effective instruction, and literacy across the curriculum. In addition to her consulting work, she is a former instructional coach, high school administrator, graduate-level education professor, and English teacher at the middle school, high school, and college levels. Her wide range of experiences allows her to work shoulder to shoulder with colleagues in any setting to improve educational outcomes.
Angela has been a Courage to Teach fellow and an instructor for the National Writing Project. She maintains memberships in several national and international education organizations and is a frequent presenter at their conferences. Her book The Data Teams Experience: A Guide for Effective Meetings (2011) supports the work of professional learning communities, and her most recent publications and consulting work highlight the importance of teaching academic vocabulary.
A Virginia native, Angela earned her bachelor’s degree in English at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, her master’s degree in liberal arts at Hollins College, and her doctorate at the University of South Carolina. Her professional licensures include secondary English, secondary administration, and gifted and talented education. She has also studied presentation design and delivery with expert Rick Altman. In 2015, she engaged in graduate study in brain-based learning.
To learn more about Angela’s work, visit www.drangelapeery.com or follow @drangelapeery on Twitter.
To book Kimberly A. Tyson or Angela B. Peery for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
Today’s world seems to move at the speed of light, and schools are no exception. The academic expectations for students zoom higher, high-stakes and low-stakes testing consume precious instructional hours, and teachers are increasingly conflicted about exactly what to teach and how best to do so. Educational policies will continue to shift and change the K–12 landscape; however, the importance of vocabulary will remain constant. Vocabulary and word knowledge are essential, serving as the basic building blocks of language and impacting fluency, comprehension, and achievement.
Vocabulary and Achievement in School and Beyond
First, to be clear, let’s begin with a working definition of vocabulary. Vocabulary, in its simplest form, refers to the words we use to communicate effectively when we listen, speak, read, and write. Going a layer deeper, vocabulary is often divided into two broad categories that are useful for discussing words and word usage: receptive and expressive vocabulary. Receptive vocabulary refers to those words we understand when we listen and read, and expressive vocabulary refers to the words we use when speaking and writing. One’s receptive vocabulary is much broader than one’s expressive vocabulary. For example, a two-year-old child understands when his parent tells him that it’s time to go outside to play, and since it’s cold he’ll need to bundle up in a coat, mittens, and a scarf. More than likely, the toddler will run to the closet and pull out his coat, mittens, and scarf even though he may not be able to verbalize this himself. Similarly, students understand many more specific words that you use within classroom discussions than they use when speaking and writing. Our overarching goal in vocabulary instruction is to help you move words in students’ receptive banks to their expressive banks through direct instruction, indirect instruction, and the use of digital tools and games to review and practice with words. It’s only through accurate use of new words that students add them to their personal lexicons.
A robust vocabulary helps students achieve success. Students must encounter new words in order to build their vocabulary and their knowledge of various concepts. Conceptual understanding, along with both general and specific word knowledge, impacts learning at every level. In addition, when older students know the meaning of specific words and are able to put related words together during a unit of study, they can connect to new content more readily and remember more (Marzano & Simms, 2013). Conversely, students who are deficient in vocabulary face numerous obstacles. Their reading range is limited, their writing lacks specificity and voice, and their spoken language lacks range of word choice and may give others a negative or inaccurate first impression.
It is not only for the purpose of individual growth and achievement that we teachers need to address vocabulary learning more directly than we have in the past. Many educators are familiar with the various research studies that correlate low literacy with poverty, unemployment, and incarceration (Baer, Kutner, Sabatini, & White, 2009; Hart & Risley, 2003). While we certainly want each student we teach to reach his or her full potential, there is also a large-scale, societal benefit when students increase their literacy. Literate adults are more likely to be employed, so they contribute to the economy through expenditures and taxes. They are also more likely to be well educated, and this bodes well for their families, as well-educated parents provide social and material advantages to their children. During the Great Recession in the United States, those with higher levels of education fared best—an outcome tied to literacy success (Rampell, 2013). Well-honed literacy skills provide a cushion against many types of hardship in a person’s life. Effective vocabulary instruction is an integral piece of the puzzle that can help the young people we see every day in our classrooms become literate for life.
Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension
Vocabulary and its interconnected relationship with comprehension has been the focus of a great deal of research—both quantitative and qualitative—over many years. Decades of research reveal that vocabulary knowledge strongly correlates to reading comprehension. Landmark studies such as Frederick B. Davis’s (1944, 1968) factor analysis and reanalysis by others (Spearritt, 1972; Thurstone, 1946) reveal that adults who have greater word knowledge and score high on vocabulary tests also score high on tests of reading comprehension. In other words, even though reading comprehension is a complex process, word knowledge plays the most important role.
Vocabulary and word knowledge also play an important role in comprehension for students. It is so critical to comprehension that the National Reading Panel (2000) includes vocabulary as one of the five essential components—or building blocks—of reading.