Reading and Research
Writing
Speaking, Listening, and Presenting
Mathematics
The Classroom Learning Environment
Final Thoughts
Words to Replace the Overused Verb Said
Words to Replace the Adjective Nice
Final Thoughts
Appendix: Index of All Vocabulary Words Appearing in the Book
About the Author
Angela B. Peery, EdD, is a consultant and author and has been a teacher since 1986. Since 2004, she has made more than one thousand presentations and has authored or coauthored 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 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 http://drangelapeery.com or follow @drangelapeery on Twitter.
To book Angela B. Peery for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
Since the 1990s, teachers have begun to realize that “look it up in the dictionary” or “check the glossary” is not an appropriate response when students inquire about a word’s meaning. Thankfully, in most classrooms, the weekly lists of words to study for Friday quizzes have been replaced with vocabulary assignments that create better retention. Teachers know that their students need to learn and use more words than ever. Why have teachers come to this conclusion? Three factors have influenced most of the teachers with whom I work.
First, the increasing rate of children living in poverty means that students arrive in prekindergarten or kindergarten programs already displaying a vocabulary deficit. The thirty-million-word gap, as it is known, refers to the number of words that students in welfare-dependent families have heard spoken versus the number of words that students in professional families have heard spoken before they enter school (Hart & Risley, 2003). This gap, if not addressed, is compounded over time and becomes a serious impediment to reading comprehension. Studies show that kindergarten vocabulary knowledge accurately predicts second-grade reading comprehension (Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 2002). Anne E. Cunningham and Keith E. Stanovich’s (1997) work shows a correlation between first-grade vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in high school. Thus, boosting our economically disadvantaged students’ vocabulary is incredibly important because they have an early and huge disadvantage that impacts their achievement through their teenage years. (And, ethically, boosting every student’s vocabulary should be part of each school’s mission.)
Second, academic standards have increased in rigor, and they demand that students have large, general academic vocabularies in addition to advanced, discipline-specific vocabularies. The United States and other nations’ adopted standards have been crafted with attention to the workings of our global economy. It’s simply no longer possible for the masses in most countries to get a good factory or office job with attractive benefits and comfortable pensions upon leaving secondary school. The world has changed a great deal since the 1960s, and the best jobs now require high levels of literacy and numeracy in addition to nonacademic skills like effective collaboration and technological savvy. Teachers feel pressed for time, as they always have, but they also know that the high level of literacy needed for success in academia and in the workplace requires more attention to vocabulary.
And third, teachers know that students with rich vocabularies do better in many facets of life. Reading comprehension is definitely tied to the strength and size of one’s vocabulary, as mentioned previously. Oral expression, which factors greatly into first impressions, is highly dependent on a person’s vocabulary. A first impression is often critical to a student’s success—for example, a college or job interview depends on making a good first impression. Teachers also know that as students progress through school, the demands in each subject area increase. Those content-area demands require a deep understanding of hundreds of words. Our students, many of whom have been subjected to years of multiple-choice testing of reading and vocabulary, must be reconditioned to learn words not only at a recognition level or with answers from which to choose but also at a deep level for application in speaking and writing.
The Teacher’s Perspective
I understand the concerns that teachers have about the size and strength of their students’ vocabularies. When I was a full-time classroom teacher, my concerns were mainly about the actual words I should teach explicitly because they were vital to understanding content, and how to best encourage incidental or self-directed vocabulary learning. These areas of concern seem to resonate with the hundreds of teachers I’ve worked with to improve vocabulary instruction as well.
I also understand that teachers have doubts about the words their instructional materials target for instruction. When I was teaching short stories, essays, drama, and poetry, I questioned the words my literature textbook emphasized. Sometimes I thought, “Who in the world selected these words?” Archaic terms, words used metaphorically, and lists of words to study for the ACT and SAT often seemed so disconnected from what I felt my students needed to know right then for academic success.
My doubts were validated when, as a high school English teacher, I discovered that my students lacked a knowledge of words that I assumed they knew well. For example, I was surprised once when my students, who knew the word summary and had actually written summaries in my class, couldn’t tell me what the word summarize meant. This moment, in the first class of the day, allowed me to check with all my students later in the day about their knowledge of inflectional endings. I remember being fairly shocked that ninth graders didn’t know the ending -ize is used with verbs. (Thus, summarize often means “to write a summary”). Upon further probing, I discovered the majority of them didn’t know that -er or -or in a noun often signifies