Dr. Connor's Vocabulary Answers

The Fry Sight-Word Inventory is an informal, criterion-referenced screener which measures high-frequency word achievement. Fry 's Instant Words have been determined as the most common words used in English ranked in order of frequency. Specifically, Fry found that twenty-five words make up approximately a third of all items published, one-hundred words comprise almost half of all of the words found in publications, and three-hundred words make up approximately sixty-five percent of all written material. The first three-hundred words on Fry’s list should be mastered by the end of corresponding grade levels, and lists four through ten should be mastered between fourth and fifth grades. Each hundred words are broken down even further into twenty-five words per list, according to difficulty and frequency, and should be assessed sequentially. The goal of progress monitoring high-frequency word mastery is to increase fluency on high-frequency words in order to further automaticity within our students’ reading, which ultimately impacts overall comprehension.

“Words Their Way is a developmental spelling, phonics, and vocabulary program. It was developed by Invernizzi, Johnston, Bear, and Templeton. Words Their Way is intended to be a part of a balanced literacy plan that includes fluency, comprehension and writing. Word study is implemented as a small component of the literacy plan but it is also interwoven in actual reading and writing texts.” Through my participation of such classes and by experiences that I have encountered with literacy and assessments, I feel that I have mastered standards 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4. I can successfully use data from assessment tools to guide the instruction needed within my classroom or on an individual basis. As a classroom teacher, I work closely with the

As of this year, I have learned how to use tier three words in my writing. I did not know what tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 words were before taking this class. A big part of learning how to expand my vocabulary was writing essays throughout the year. I learned that making stories interesting is what really grabs readers attention and makes them want to continue reading. What helped me change my use of vocabulary to make my stories worth reading for others? I made a list of words that all mean the same thing, then used the one that added life to the story or would drives the reader to keep reading. I can now go into interviews and talk to professionals with a larger vocabulary. This year, learning to expand my word choices has improved my writing and how I present myself has become better than it has ever

Building vocabulary is an important task in the early grades. There has long been debate on how one should go about teaching vocabulary such as, it is better to teach a limited number of words fully and more intense or expose children to many words to enhance “incidental learning”. Research has proven that incorporating both into instruction is most effective. Read-aloud and teachers increase use of vocabulary have also been proven to help vocabulary and word knowledge. There are three tiers of words that children are presented in their life. Tier one words are those that they are most familiar with such as park, tier 2 are the increasingly hard words such as fortunate and finally the tier 3 words are words that students have rarely been exposed

In the New York Times article from 2013 titled Public Policy, Made to Fit People, Richard H. Thaler addresses the issues surrounding education and the vocabulary gap between children of middle-class and above families, versus that of poor families. In this article, Thaler claims that at the early age of three years old, children who come from middle class families have roughly double the vocabulary span of their poor counterparts.

Learning New Words From Storybooks: An Efficacy Study With At-Risk Kindergartners by Laura M. Justice, Joanne Meier and Sharon Walpole set out to evaluate the effectiveness of implementing storybook reading activities to at risk kindergarten children who are in low socioeconomic status communities. The study examined the ability to learn new words from reading the same books over a period of 10 weeks and whether elaboration versus non-elaboration of specific words in context would influence the accusation of vocabulary. This is relevant to reading as vocabulary acquisition is a strong predictor for future reading performance. The study several references research articles in which deficits in vocabulary suggested potential future reading problems. Given this idea, the study aimed to identify means in which to enhance low SES children's vocabulary in order to potentially encourage future reading development.

Describe how you plan to support the children (during and/or prior to the learning experience) to develop and use the key vocabulary identified in prompt 4a.

According to the KC Chambers Announces New “Big 5” Goal: Building Kansas City’s workforce of Tomorrow through Kindergarten Readiness” (2014), “By the age of three, children from low-income families will hear roughly 30 million fewer words than children from more affluent families, placing them at a disadvantage well before they ever cross the schoolhouse door for their first day of kindergarten”. According to this study and many others like it, the lack of words correlates directly to the amount of money that the family is able to spend. The lower the socioeconomic status is, the lower amount of words in the child’s vocabulary. There are many factors that attribute to the word gap. This includes the parents of the children’s educational background, the availability to access books, libraries and computers, and the time the parents do spend the time interacting with the

For many of the students in my class, vocabulary instruction is of chief importance to their reading comprehension and their understanding of larger concepts discussed in class. The standard I am choosing to discuss is one I implement weekly, if not daily, in my lessons because without the skills and strategies to learn new words and understand the various meanings of words and phrases, students will struggle to succeed

Vocabulary plays a crucial part in a child learning to read. A student that has limited vocabulary often prevents them from comprehending the text that he or she reads. Students that do not read well often times read less because they find that reading is tough and frustrating. Since these low level readers do not read enough their vocabulary does not improve. Unfortunately, as the student continues through school the gap between good readers and poor readers widens tremendously.

One of the identified critical instructional components for helping students learn to read is vocabulary. Since the National Reading Panel (2000) and the National Early Literacy Panel (2009) reported that strong early oral vocabulary knowledge is a predictor for later successful reading outcomes, an increased research and teaching focus in this area has arisen.

This article explains the theoretical underpinnings of vocabulary instruction and its importance to content area teaching. Additionally, the article provides four methods for educators to implement vocabulary learning in their classrooms. The article begins by indicating that vocabulary is a “predictor” for reading comprehension ability and students’ reading performance. Moreover, when a reader knows more words they can read more complex texts and write with more sophistication. The authors note that vocabulary knowledge needs intensify as students move up the middle and upper-secondary grades, with students needing to know well over 88,500 word families by the time they enter the ninth grade. In order to meet this need, content area teachers should focus not on direct instruction of vocabulary - e.g., assigning vocabulary list for defining and using in sentences - but rather focus on more context dependent vocabulary instruction. The recommended methods for teaching vocabulary in the secondary grades include: assigning (1) wide reading (reading 60 mins a day = 2,250,000 words a year); (2) select specific words and phrases to teach; (3) model word solving; and (4) utilize words in discussion. Ultimately, vocabulary is central to content area learning and it is important for vocabulary to

Whereas according to Richards and Renandya (2002) (as cited in Rohmatillah, 2014), vocabulary is a core component of language proficiency and

I began the research through developing a list of key words and terms that were relevant to my chosen topic of kindergarten vocabulary instruction. These terms included, but were not limited to kindergarten vocabulary instruction, effective vocabulary instruction, vocabulary instruction, and kindergarten classroom practices. Using Eagle search, Education Full Text, and Google Scholar I was able to find four pertinent studies using the key term “kindergarten vocabulary instruction”. After reading the abstracts of these four studies, I changed the key terms and searched emergent vocabulary instruction,

　　The vocabulary skills of a child are also associated with how often parents read books to them as well as the quality of reading. It is important for both father and mother to read to their children every day as this will not only help children to build their vocabulary, but it will also give the ability to memories and fast learning skills. In addition to the frequent reading, the quality of reading, which is included but not limited to talk about the text. If someone is just reading the book word by word but does not ask questions or talk extra about the text, it isn’t sufficient enough for children to do better in vocabulary. Thus both, the quality and frequent reading are far reaching aspects for the growth of vocabulary among children.