Four Strategies for Adolescent Vocabulary Instruction

Cathy Collins-Block

Cathy Collins-Block, a professor of education at Texas Christian University, promised her audience four new activities by the time the session ended. "I want you to be able to grow and when you leave me today to change your practice so that every child can learn to read," she stated. Collins-Block was one of the nationally recognized presenters at the McKay School's Literacy Promise, held recently in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Collins-Block declared that her four strategies would allow teachers to teach the definition and use of every word in the English language. These strategies are urgently needed she told her audience, because in order to successfully graduate from high school, students need to have mastered the use of 175,000 words and their meanings.

According to Collins-Block the data from a recent study on the four strategies indicated that they produced growth in students regardless of gender, socio-economic status, and other factors that often impact reading scores. Illustrating the potential, she told about Darcy's book-an 89-page manuscript created in one night by a first grader. The child's intent was to give writing hints to authors writing children's books.

Collins-Block's four secrets
Collins-Block explained how the meaning for frequently appearing words is always available from clues in the paragraph's context. "Tell your students to think about the part of speech the word is performing in the sentence," she instructed, "and to add the meanings all the way around the word."

Second, students should look past prefixes or suffixes to find the root word definition. She explained that by learning one root's meaning, the meaning of all words in that "vocabulary building family' become clear. For example, the word hand is self-explanatory. Try finding a word with "hand" embedded where the definition does not relate to the use of the hand. You can't. The word "under" is another example. "Boys like this strategy," said Collins-Block.

Her third strategy involved content specific words. "Every word you don't see a lot will be a noun," said Collins-Block. Of course a noun is a word created for a specific thing. She instructed teachers to tell their students to read the entire paragraph in order to get clues about what the noun means.

And finally, Collins-Block explained that words with unusual letter combinations usually come from another language. She used the example of fatigue, which is French. Collin-Block suggested teaching students that these words cannot be sounded out-to prevent embarrassing moments for students when they read aloud. For these words, students must develop their own individual clues for the word meaning, pronunciation, and spelling.

Cathy Collins-Block
Cathy Collins Block, Ph.D., is a professor of education at Texas Christian University in
Fort Worth, Texas. She is a member of the board of Directors and/or editorial boards for the American Psychological Association, International Reading Association, and National Reading Conference. She has received the prestigious Paul A. Witty Award for Meritorious Service from International Reading Association (1998) and the Texas Christian University Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Research (2005), the highest award the university affords faculty.

4 April 2008