Incidental And Explicit Vocabulary Learning

Reading can provide many benefits to the reader. One of those benefits is the expansion of the reader’s vocabulary. The more a reader reads, the broader the reader’s vocabulary.

Vocabulary is the knowledge of words that able us to communicate with others orally, or in writing, and it is acquired through listening or reading. A learning experience of vocabulary, that is called indirect, is obtained when children engage in daily conversation with family and friends, through read aloud by adults, or through own reading. Instead, the learning experience of vocabulary, gained through teacher word instruction, it’s called direct.

All students need direct instruction of vocabulary, but it is especially imperative for ELLs. They need much more exposure to new vocabulary than their native-English-speaking classmates. ELLs need to learn cognates, prefixes, suffixes, and root words to enhance their ability to make sense of new lexicon. Beginning ELLs and more advanced ELL students should actively engage in holistic activities to practice new vocabulary because learning words out of context is difficult for these students. If they memorize the meanings of the words on a list, they will not be able to use the words in their own writing or verbal production until they really understand the meanings. When vocabulary instruction includes explicit, implicit, and strategy instruction, students are repeatedly exposed to the target vocabulary in a variety of contexts which increases their individual vocabulary development and the other resources that help in doing so is the Semantic Mapping primary focus on visual relationships, which is helpful to students from all backgrounds.

“A Read Aloud Curriculum integrates intentional direct comprehension and explicit vocabulary instruction into read alouds while maintaining the integrity of an authentic read aloud experience that would be highly engaging for students (Fien, et al., 2011).” The Read Aloud program is structures as to “(a) set a purpose for reading, (b) building vocabulary knowledge, (c) making text-to-text and text-to-life connections, and (d) having students retell stories or information on a regular basis (Fien, et al., 2011).” The problem is that Read Alouds by themselves do not help close the gap between children who enter school with strong vocabularies and children who enter school with weak vocabularies, accordingly the gap between students with strong and weak vocabularies only grows as the children progress through school. Another setback for students with weak vocabularies is that there is a direct link between word knowledge and comprehension, consequently the children with weak vocabularies will struggle with comprehension. Small-group instruction shows promise in improving student’s vocabularies thus improving their comprehension. By spending more time with the text and receiving instruction in a group of 2-5 students, those with weak vocabularies have shown improvement in their word knowledge and

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

Studies confirm a high correlation of 0.6 to 0.8 between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (Baumann & Kame’enui as cited in Dalton and Grisham, 2011 p. 307). However, the rate at which individual children develop vocabulary knowledge is enormously varied. At 5 years old there is already a 30 million word exposure gap (Hart & Risley as cited in Dalton and Grisham, 2011 p. 307). Linguistic morphology, the study of words and word origins, is a significant component of vocabulary learning programs. Children should be actively supplied with multiple exposures to words and exposures in varying contexts. Walbank and Bisby (2016, p. 11) describe how building adjective vocabulary adds dramatically more interest, accuracy and detail to students oral and written language. To encourage this development, students can work in small groups to brainstorm alternative, more interesting words, for commonly used adjectives. For example, replacing the word ‘good’ with ‘magnificent’, ‘superlative’ or ‘exceptional’. This direct vocabulary instruction is essential, but having only explicit teaching is insufficient. Beck et al (2008) estimate that educators can only actively teach 300-400 words per year (as cited in Dalton and Grisham, 2011 p. 307). Also, research indicates that children learn a far greater number of words indirectly through reading, than from instruction (Cunningham & Stanovich as

In addition to the vocabulary in their readings, students have been expected to learn twenty-five new vocabulary words per week. The focus is not on rote memorization of definitions; students must know synonyms, antonyms, and especially how to use vocabulary words in the context of the entire sentence. They study how to choose the right word for their purpose (diction) and analyze the subtleties of language.

This gives students the words they need to know in order to communicate in a proper way. The two different types of vocabulary are oral and reading; oral is words that are used while speaking or notice when listening and reading is the words that are noticed in text. This concept is important because when children start to speak, they eventually start to understand and notice words in text. Also, it is important for them to understand the meaning of the words in order to understand the text the are reading. This is why the teacher in my class has the children become familiar with the books and reading them by going over the words and their meanings, so they can understand the story in general and they’d be able to sequence things more

Viewing the “Comprehension” clip, reminded me of my own experience within the classroom. Mr. deLeon introduced vocabulary words such as evidence, decoy, and suspense to help students better comprehend what they’ll read. The teacher also activated the students’ prior knowledge of the words. When a word was hardier to understand, Mr. deLeon gave an anecdote for the word decoy. Teachers use many techniques to introduced vocabulary words in order for them to get a grasp on a text while reading. I read to the children daily, but before I review unfamiliar vocabulary before reading. I ask the class if they’ve ever heard the word before, and if so, if they can help me give definition to the meaning. This doesn’t guarantee students to fully understand

English language learners need direct instruction of new vocabulary (Haynes, 2010.) Educators must provide practice saying new words. ELL’s should have more exposure to new terms, words, idioms, and phrases than their English fluent classmates. Educators must tie new vocabulary to previous knowledge and use pictorials to highlight significance. Content area Educators are encouraged to teach new vocabulary that occurs in text as well as that related the subject materials.

Reading aloud is a common practice in primary classrooms and is viewed as an important vehicle for vocabulary development. Read aloud are complex instructional interactions in which teachers choose texts, identify words for instruction, and select the appropriate strategies to facilitate word learning. Reading aloud to children provides a powerful context for word learning. During read aloud interactions, word learning occurs both incidentally and as I stop and elaborates on particular words to provide an explanation, demonstration, or example.

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

​Teaching speaking effectively goes in hand with DA and several language applications which focus on how oral speech needs to be delivered. Hence, vocabulary one of the three main elements is the one that deals with the lexicon of the language. Instructors need to teach words in context; as a consequence, the new lexis will be storage faster and it will be ready to be used either in spoken or written language (Scrivener 2011:200).

Although vocabulary is the sub-skill of a language, it plays a very important role in language learning and teaching. In fact, vocabulary is central to language and is of paramount importance to language learners. On the other hand, words are the building blocks of a language that are used to label objects, actions, and ideas. In other words, people cannot convey the intended meaning without knowing vocabulary. It is widely accepted that vocabulary is a very important part in English language learning because no one can communicate in any meaningful way without vocabulary. As McCarthy (1990) stated, the single, biggest component of any language course is vocabulary. Nation (1990) also affirms that vocabulary can be considered as the most important element in language learning because Learners think that many of their

Vocabulary plays a significant role in English as second language learning process. For the majority of English as Second Language(ESL) learners, the ultimate goal of learning the language is to understand (read and listen) and communicate (write and speak) with little difficulty and the lack of sufficient vocabulary may be the constraint of such goal (Folse, 2004). As the bedrock of English and as well as language, vocabulary also facilitates the development of other language skills: lexical richness leads to the progress in the use of language, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing skills (Nation, 1994). Reversely, The improvement in such skills may enhance learners vocabulary size as the exposure to more learning materials improves the capacity to acquire new vocabulary. (The importance of learning vocabulary/ why vocabulary?)