New Science Vocabulary Analysis

A word wall for scientific vocabulary can be created for courses like Chemistry, Physical Science, Earth Science, and Physics core classes. For example, in chemistry a word wall for physical changes, chemical change, and periodic table vocabulary can be constructed by the students. For Physics, words like speed, velocity, kinetic energy, and potential energy can be posted on the wall for a lesson on forces and motion to help facilitate the acquisition of academic terminology for ELL learners in the field of science. Also concepts that are opposite to each other like strong/weak, long/short. Hot/cold, soft/hard, ect. allows students to develop critical thinking skills required for comparing and contract analysis.

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 word wall consisting of scientific vocabulary can be created for science courses like Chemistry, Physical Science, Earth Science, and Physics core classes. For example, in chemistry a word wall for physical changes, chemical change, and periodic table vocabulary can be constructed by the students. For Physics, words like speed, velocity, kinetic energy, and potential energy can be posted on a word wall for a lesson on forces and motion to help facilitate the acquisition of academic terminology for ELL learners in the field of science. Also, concepts that are opposite to each other like strong/weak,

Interactive word walls are different than traditional word walls in the classroom, which are usually used to highlight sight words the students learned. These traditional word walls are created solely by the teacher and are not changed throughout the school year. An interactive word wall is exactly as it sounds; a wall in which the students and the teacher interact to create a science word wall highlighting the important concepts of the current unit. Interactive word walls have many benefits when used in conjunction with science lessons. Three of the benefits I noticed were that they allow for a gradual release model in teaching, and aid in student comprehension, as well as student involvement in learning.

For many years, teachers have worked to make their students become more proficient in their reading abilities. To make students more proficient readers, teachers work to create a more extensive vocabulary as many researchers say it is needed to better one’s vocabulary skills (Constantinescu, 2007). The primary method teachers have used when teaching vocabulary is explicit instruction which includes mentioning the definition and expecting students to remember the word meanings (Kennedy, Deshler, & Lloyd, 2013). Instead of continuing to use explicit instruction to teach vocabulary, educators should use untraditional methods of teaching such as the use of technology to enhance their methods of teaching vocabulary to better all students.

Fossils Tell of Long Ago uses accessible language and illustrations to aid all students in vocabulary and new concept growth. Explicit instructions, reading the book allowed to the class, and allowing conversation among individual students as they work through learning new words will aid ELL students in expanding their word knowledge. Furthermore, having ELL students translate new word to into their native language will help them activate their previous knowledge. Encouraging all students to be actively engage in learning words will ensure that ELL students and all students will gain knowledge and make connections to new words.

Hands-on activities are important for developing understanding at every age and level in science. Special Education teacher Mr. B. noted that students develop more of a connection when they can actually perform experiments and tasks, instead of just reading about them in a textbook. Mastropieri and Scuggs claim in their article, Teaching Science to Students with Disabilities in General Education Settings that "activities-oriented material used far less vocabulary, far less independent reading, paper, and pencil work . . ."( 1995, pg.11). This leads to special needs students having less focus on their skills abilities, and more emphasis on learning the scientific materials. (Mastropieri and Scruggs, 1995).

One of the reasons that some students struggle in studying and learning in core areas is lack of content-related vocabulary. We acknowledge that the most challenging situation is with English language learners (ELLs). This is the reason Texas has adopted the English Language Proficiency Standards (ELPS) to be able to support the ELLs as they learn the required Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). However, on a large scale, we observe that even some of our students who are native English speakers also sometimes struggle academically. This is because some of our core areas such as math and science are also foreign to them. We normally do not use words such as bivariate, coefficient, tectonics, metalloids, etc. in our daily conversation. This is what makes learning our core areas challenging if we do not address vocabulary as we teach content.

The students need further intervention in vocabulary development in the technology education content area. There are many strategies for teaching academic vocabulary each of which can provide students with opportunities to build word knowledge. After some investigation of the strategies, this researcher determined that Marzano’s Six-Step Process for Building Academic Vocabulary best suits the sixth-grade technology class. Marzano’s Six-Step Process for Building Academic Vocabulary will be used as the basis for vocabulary development intervention. Marzano's Six-Step Process promotes the use of both technology and games to increase vocabulary development.

choosing the best instruction is very important Because of its vocabulary role,. In this boundary, a lot of works have been done, but The NRP’s synthesis of vocabulary research distinguish eight findings that provide a scientifically based foundation for the design of rich, multifaceted vocabulary instruction. these findings include:

Graphic organizers are frequently used aids to aid in the comprehension of informational text for both regular and special education students in elementary, intermediate and secondary grade levels. They are simply defined as a visual representation of information in the text. According to Ausubel’s work, they enhance students’ learning and retention of unfamiliar but meaningful materials (Manoli & Papadopulou, 2012). The use of graphic organizers enables teachers to facilitate the readers’ understanding of the text through visual depictions of key terms and concepts and the relationships among them (Kim, Vaughn, Wanzek, & Shangjin, 2004). Because students with learning disabilities often have difficulty with everyday reading and organizational skills such as connecting new materials to prior knowledge, drawing inferences, and identifying and ignoring unnecessary information, it becomes especially challenging when these students are faced with challenging expository text with which to interpret and comprehend (Dexter & Hughes, 2011). With the current emphasis in education on higher order thinking, educators must provide students with effective strategies to expand their skills (Sundeen, 2007). Therefore , in order to facilitate the highest level of learning possible, the learning strategy of using graphic organizers can be beneficial (Kim et al., 2004).

Grace moved to Boise, ID, from Korea, less than a year ago. While I have seen her grow over the past couple of months in her reading and spelling, I feel Grace would benefit from increasing her academic vocabulary knowledge. An example of this is when I read a book about raking leaves and did not realize that this was not basic vocabulary knowledge for her. She struggled with reading the story and with comprehension, simply because of her lack of vocabulary understanding. While I realize I need to teach Grace vocabulary, I have struggled with figuring out the best way to do this. I want to teach vocabulary in a way that will be relevant and engaging for Grace. I decided to do some research on the topic of teaching vocabulary to students.

Lesson- For this reading lesson, I will be reading the book, "Insects from Outer Space" to my students. Prior to reading the book, I would like to introduce the vocabulary from the story in a pocket chart. I would tell the students what the vocabulary word is, then ask them, ‘what word is this?’, and then have them repeat the word back to me; (For example: I will say the word ‘antennae’, ask the students what word is this? ‘antennae’, and then have the students repeat the word ‘antennae’ back to me. I would then provide an explanation of the word ‘antennae’ to the students to give them information about the word. I would follow this format for each vocabulary word in the pocket chart. Once I had completed the list of vocabulary words I would go back and use the words in a sentence strip. I would put each sentence strip in the pocket chart for each vocabulary word as I read them. After I had completed the sentence strips, I will read the story, “Insects From Outer Space” to my students. During the reading of the story, I will ask my students to put their thumbs up when they hear a vocabulary word that had been introduced them to prior to the story. A formative

“A well-balanced lesson will contain some activities which are designed to encourage the students to talk and express themselves… to communicate.” (Holden and Rogers 1998, 15) In this sense, I found that the planning of activities was very adequate. Learners had the opportunity to read, find and identify lexis. When that was solved, exposing their ideas to the rest of the class provided them with time to communicate.

In this study, the dependent variable was the science performance on the biology assessments. The variable was measured through the use of the daily 10-item tests. Each assessment followed the same format, which was: 5 matching questions with a word bank of 10 words, two multiple-choice questions with four options each, and three short-answer questions which had two-part response. This study was important to do because students with disabilities struggle in core subjects, especially science. This study was conducted to see if there is a research based way to effectively help these students.