Education Week - February 6, 2013 - 17

EDUCATION WEEK

WHICH WORDS MATTER?
Some experts recommend that educators ask themselves a
series of questions on how to prioritize vocabulary words in a
story they are teaching their students. For example, the class
will read a story next week including the words “platypus,”
“principle,” and “baby.”
QUESTION

Would students likely pick up this
word in normal conversation?

platypus,
principle

baby

YES

Words like “baby” are common, and researchers
have found most children will learn them without
direct instruction.

QUESTION

Will students need to understand
and use this word in order to
participate academically in multiple
academic subject areas?

more difficult words from upcoming texts.
“It gets very tricky,” he said. “The
words aren’t terribly important;
they aren’t words you’d really care
if the children know or not. If the
next story has a platypus in it,
that’s a hard word; we might as
well teach it. ... We’ve managed to
get publishers off ‘cat,’ but they’ve
swung over to ‘platypus.’ ”
Jeff Byrd, the director of product
marketing for reading at Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, in Boston, said
common words are included in kindergarten and 1st grade basal readers because students may not have
connected the spoken word to a
printed one. Including “easy” words
helps students read independently,
he said.
Mr. Hirsch said research shows
children learn the bulk of their
vocabulary implicitly in context,
but educators and book publishers
still must find a better balance of
explaining words day to day and
building the vocabularies of stu-

FEBRUARY 6, 2013

dents, particularly those who enter
with a vocabulary lag.
Mr. Shanahan agreed: “Common
core is really pushing you to do two
things: Don’t neglect vocabulary in
the text you are reading, but simultaneously you are responsible for
expanding students’ vocabulary.”
However, Houghton Mifflin’s Mr.
Byrd said the publisher’s 2014
basal-reader series Journeys Common Core, which was revised to
meet the new standards, has a
much stronger emphasis on explicit
vocabulary instruction.
For kindergarten and 1st grade,
the curriculum does teach 88 common words each year; children are
expected to know the meanings of
those words already, and they are
noted in order to connect the spoken word to a printed word, to help
children read independently.
But the new readers also include
six to 10 academic words each
week, such as “recall” or “captured,”
and four to six challenging, contentrelated words. The challenging

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words are directly tied to Tier I and
Tier II words in Ms. Beck’s classification model.
Mr. Byrd did agree that 300 new
words per year—the maximum
number taught in the basal readers studied—would not be enough
to bring poor students, struggling
readers, and English-language
learners up to average levels.
“We recognize the studies and
the concern that there are students
who enter with this vocabulary
deficit,” Mr. Byrd said. “It’s really
frustrating to see those gaps persist despite the fact that, as content
providers, we make our best efforts
to help teachers close that gap.”
Scan this tag with your
smartphone for a link
to “What Classroom
Observations Reveal
About Oral Vocabulary Instruction in
Kindergarten” and “Vocabulary
Instruction in Commonly Used
Kindergarten Core Reading Curricula”
at www.edweek.org/links.

The Leadership and Learning Center®
principle

platypus

YES

Words like “principle” are considered academically
important words, with multiple meanings in different
contexts. They are among the most sophisticated
words students learn, are prioritized by the common
core, and often require multiple repetitions and
supports in order to be learned fully.

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QUESTION

Do students need to understand
this word in order to comprehend
this text?

baby, principle, platypus

MAYBE

If a difficult word is not defined within the text, or given sufficient context
clues so students can understand it, it may need to be defined explicitly.
SOURCE: Education Week

vocabulary words highlighted in
those books based on three measures of difficulty used by earlyliteracy researchers.
One such measure, the DaleChall list, includes 7,875 words
commonly known by 4th graders,
considering unlisted words more
“sophisticated.”
The “Words Worth Teaching” list
differentiates words that most children know by 2nd grade; those that
40 percent to 80 percent of children
know by the end of 2nd grade;
those that 40 percent to 80 percent
of children know by the end of 6th
grade; and “difficult” words known
by fewer than 40 percent of rising
6th graders.
Finally, the researchers grouped
words based on a three-tier system
developed by Isabel L. Beck, a professor emerita of education at the
University of Pittsburgh. Tier I, or
basic, words can be learned without
instruction; Tier II words are academic words used over many subject areas; and Tier III are “difficult,
content-specific” words.
Ms. Neuman and Ms. Wright

found that, on average, the reading curricula introduced eight to
10 new words a week, and a majority of those were easy, commonly
known words.
“Essentially, what we found was
a very haphazard approach to vocabulary instruction,” Ms. Neuman
said.“The ‘challenging’ vocabulary
choices were not based on frequency, not based on the supporting academic words children need
to know like ‘during’ and ‘after,’ not
content-rich words, like ‘predict.’
Why would you choose to emphasize the word ‘platypus’? It makes
no sense.”
Ways of targeting vocabulary
words have been evolving in the
past decade, Mr. Shanahan said.
Reading materials developed in
the early 1990s tend to focus on the
phonics of words, so the word “cat”
might have been chosen to highlight the “-at” sound, rather than
because educators need to teach
children what the word means.
Mr. Shanahan said he believes
the lack of vocabulary cohesion
comes from the attempt to choose

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Education Week - February 6, 2013

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