Building Vocabulary Across the Content Areas

Many adolescents, especially English language learners, benefit from focus on specific vocabulary. Vocabulary development and reading comprehension are interdependent: The best readers have the largest vocabularies and poor readers typically have limited vocabularies. Simply identifying an unknown word and looking it up in the dictionary is an ineffective way to increase vocabulary. But when students use vocabulary words repeatedly to construct meaning in new text, they learn and retain word meanings longer (several studies cited in Allen, 1999, Stahl, 1999, and Beers, 2003).

Choosing vocabulary words. Vocabulary work in tutoring sessions will be most successful using the texts your student is reading. Remembering adolescents’ sensitivity and need to feel confident, which question would you ask: What words don’t you know? What words do you need help with? What words would you like to know more about? The final choice is best—this question puts the learner in charge and challenges her to learn more.

Beyond the Dictionary: Strategies for Finding Word Meanings

As you read together, ask your tutee to identify words she wants to learn more about. Before using the dictionary, introduce basic strategies for figuring out word meanings from the surrounding text. Prompt your student to:

• Substitute some other word that would make sense
• Reread the sentence(s) before and after the word for clues
• Identify parts of the word she recognizes
• Look for other words in the passage that might be related, refer to something similar, or are synonyms or antonyms

Once struggling readers understand how to approximate word meanings from context clues, they will begin to pick up vocabulary as they read (Stahl, 1999). At this point, more reading time and broader selections will be the main ways readers learn new words. However, English language learners and other students with low language exposure will also benefit from direct vocabulary instruction.

Word Cards: Collecting and Reusing Vocabulary Throughout Your Year