Monday, February 7, 2011
Vocabulary: The paints of the mind's vivid imagination
The readings for the Vocabulary Module make me realize how unfortunate it is that so many students have gotten into the secondary level of school without having enough knowledge of how to decipher and unravel the meanings of words they do not recognize. How few have a working knowledge of dictionaries or thesaurus. Their knowledge of words comes from spoken language in school and at home. Most of the time when they have heard of a word they would not recognize the word in text or can not look up the word in a dictionary because they do not know how to spell it or take apart it's sounds to try to spell it. These same students can decipher a digital apparatus and learn how to operate it less than a day. So the root problem must lie in the manner in which vocabulary words are presented to them. With most learning processes the student must have some ownership and interest in the learning process or they will not even make the effort to learn. This is the question...how to make words interesting?
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What do you do for the children who don't come from environments that use rich vocabulary? I agree with what you said about the knowledge of words coming from spoken language within the home, but what do you do if that is not ocurring? Also, what do you do with the children that come to us years behind?
ReplyDeleteThose are good questions and I have no idea the answer. I always thought that kids saying they can't comprehend the reading stemmed from being lazy; I thought, OK, you can speak English, you can read English and the reading is in English, you should be able to read.
ReplyDeleteThis class has me rethinking that stance. We read an article today about the war in Iraq with my 7th graders and I had them box every word that they did not know or were not familiar with. In three classes, we came up with 18 words that the students were unfamiliar with and with a lot of students (and groups) coming up with the same words, like insurgency and coalition and faction. But there were also some words I expected them to know like oust, curb, conceal.
I think its telling that in an article of probably 600 words that they didn't know 20 of the most important words. I am going to try to help them use context clues and prefixes and suffixes to help make them familiar, but I think its a slow process. I want to give them the tools to make sense of the words, rather than just define every word for them.
I will check back to see if anyone has any good answers
A slow process is right ... we live in a world where everything has to be a quick fix ... I have to remind myself that we can't fix these difficulties overnight.
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