Thanks to its partnership with publisher Eye on Education, EducationWorld is pleased to present this instructional strategy from Vocabulary at the Core: Teaching the Common Core State Standards, by Amy Benjamin and John T. Crow. In this tip, Benjamin and Crow identify four categories of words that can comprise vocabulary instruction to answer the question: What words do we teach?
A key factor in explicit vocabulary instruction is deciding which words to target. We certainly can’t teach every new word that students encounter, especially in an English class, where much of their assigned literature is studded with archaic words, allusions, and what the Medieval poet John Lydgate fondly refers to as “aureate” words. These would be words that, literally translated, have a “golden hue” to them—precious gems of words, glittering with their own rarity.
We need an overall game plan for vocabulary instruction. We need a master list, and that master list must consist of words worth knowing because our students will see them again and again in academic discourse. These are the words that tend to be at the core of content area reading and discussion, and their acquisition and use contributes to students’ proficiency in reading complex texts in a variety of content areas, as advocated by the Common Core State Standards.
Words that indicate the requirements of a task—e.g. analyze, clarify, discuss, implement, refute...
Words that establish relationships within units of information—e.g. accordingly, because of, even so, furthermore, likewise, whereas...
Words about space and divisions of space—e.g. adjacent, dimension, orientation, proximity, scope...
Words that are about how we think about a topic—e.g. acknowledge, imply, overarching, rudimentary, tentative...
Words about organization—e.g. breakdown, complement, exclude, mainstream, set, unit...
Words about ideas—e.g. abstract, conjecture, literal, perceive, thesis...
Words about cause and effect—e.g. affect, contributing factor, interact, result, stimulate...
Words about process—e.g. assemble, emergent, formulate, hinder, process, technique...
Words about amounts and degrees—e.g. critical, maximum, negligible, substantive, volume...
Words about time and order—e.g. chronological, index, previous, simultaneous, transient...
Words about systems—e.g. aspect, core, establishment, integral, paradigm, trigger...
Words about change and stability—e.g. accelerate, decrease, fluctuate, plateau, transform...
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