Robust Vocabulary Instruction of Tier Two Words: The Facts

During my first year as an SLP, I didn't really know exactly how I wanted to teach vocabulary.  I tried doing a Word of the Day, having students write down words and definitions in a notebook, pre-teaching curriculum vocabulary, teaching prefixes, suffixes, and root words, and many others.  I kept switching around because I didn't feel like any of those approaches were really helping the students in the long run.  They were just a temporary bandage.  The kids rarely used the words outside of my lesson since it was just a quick memorization task basically and then they could forget about it.  I wanted something that was engaging and that would truly enhance their spoken communication outside of the therapy room.

I researched a bunch of different methods/books and finally landed on 'Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction' by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan.   I barely got past the first chapter and was already hooked!  *I bought the first edition but apparently now there's a second edition!  Get it HERE.

Here is the little book description blurb from Amazon.com:

Hundreds of thousands of teachers have used this highly practical guide to help K-12 students enlarge their vocabulary and get involved in noticing, understanding, and using new words. Grounded in research, the book explains how to select words for instruction, introduce their meanings, and create engaging learning activities that promote both word knowledge and reading comprehension. The authors are trusted experts who draw on extensive experience in diverse classrooms and schools. Sample lessons and vignettes, children's literature suggestions, end-of-chapter summaries, and "Your Turn" learning activities enhance the book's utility as a classroom resource, professional development tool, or course text.

I loved this book so much that I wanted more examples and information so I went and purchased their next book 'Creating Robust Vocabulary: Frequently Asked Questions & Extended Examples.'  Check it out HERE.  This one is even more helpful than the first as it provides a ton more details and examples!!  If you want my honest opinion, you can skip the first book and go right to the Extended Examples one.  It provides a nice little review so you can really get all the info you need out of that book alone :)

What are Tier Two vocabulary words you ask?  Well I will start by defining Tier One and Tier Three...

• Tier One words:  everyday, basic, familiar words

• Tier Three words:  words that are very rare and ones that are domain specific (i.e. science, social studies vocabulary)

So now you can slide Tier Two words right in between those two and you get, according to Beck, words that are more sophisticated than the basic set but of high utility for literate language users.  Students are less likely to run into Tier Two words in everyday oral language therefore learning these words comes primarily from interaction with books. Tier One words occur in everyday conversation and meanings are more easily implied based on intonation, gestures, body language, etc.  Tier Three words are more specific and aren't used often in daily language. So the main take-away message regarding tiers is that they do not necessarily correspond to words that are hard, harder, and hardest but instead the role they play in language.

Here is the basic outline they propose for a 5-day robust instruction cycle:

Day One:  Selection is read and discussed.  Pull out some words that are necessary to overall understanding and BRIEFLY clarify them during the reading or before reading.  Key word there is BRIEFLY because stopping frequently during the read-a-loud hinders comprehension.

Day Two:  Introduce each word (pick approx 4-7 words) by providing the following information:

• the context in which the word appeared in the story
• a student-friendly definition (www.COBUILD.com)
• an additional context the word might be found
• an opportunity for students to interact with the word

Day Three:  Ask the students to respond to related questions (1 question per word) using the target words (e.g. Would someone show fear or joy if they saw something ominous?).  Then have students create a list based on brainstorming about the words (e.g. Describe some ominous situations).

Day Four:  Ask students to match targeted words with related comments (e.g. "That sounded like the wind is getting wilder").  Ask students to complete sentence stems (e.g. An ominous sight in a forest might be seeing...).  Have students think about vocabulary words outside of the classroom with different activities (i.e. Have students find an ominous situation in a TV show they're watching or a book they're reading).

Day Five:  Review of vocabulary words and assessment.  They propose assessing student knowledge in either a True/False format or Completing Sentences to truly find out their understanding of the words.  So basically more sentence stems.

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I will give you a little time to digest all of this information and then I will do another post on how I have modified the approach to work for me!  This approach is geared toward regular classrooms that have 5 consecutive days to do this and obviously we don't have that kind of time!  So with some little adjustments I have been able to make it work for my 30 minute pull-out sessions.  I mean not all of those things crammed into one session, but spread out amongst a few sessions using different methods to speed some things up.

Does anyone else use this method? Have you heard of it before?