QUESTION: Vocabulary. Learning & Acquisition

[Lori Falchi]

Hi folks,

I am wondering what are some of the ways that you all engage in the teaching and learning of vocabulary? Also, beyond explicit teaching strategies, what are some fun ways you raise word consciousness through game playing or multimodal kinds of activities?

I am interested in reaching elementary kids, especially emergent bilinguals.

Thanks,
Lori

[Marcy Prager]

Hi Lori!

There is a program called Words Their Way that works really well for emergent bilinguals if they start at the beginning level. The whole program is sorting words, the simplest words sorting by short vowel sounds. These early word sorts include the pictures with the word, so students begin to learn vocabulary in addition to learning the spelling and sounds of words.

I still love the tiles that Pat Cunningham suggests using for first graders where children listen to simple sentences and make the word in the sentence with the tiles. This is more auditory, however, and the ELL students would have to know some English. You could always supplement with picture cards for the words to be made, which is not very difficult to do, given the pictures that can be printed out from the internet.

[Lori Falchi]

Hi Marcy,

Yes, thanks. I forgot to say, I do have a copy of the Words Their Way and their English language learners version. I am thinking not so much of that type of word study as much as new ways to integrate vocabulary in content areas.

I am not familiar with those tiles, but I will look into picture card resources as you suggest.

Thanks for responding!
Lori

[Marcy Prager]

Lori,

I do a lot of quick sketches of important words across the content areas with my ELL students. I have a page filled with empty boxes with a title on top and with the student(s), I sketch and write a vocabulary word down. This also serves as a word bank for simple sentences the students can use to write poetry or a three sentence paragraph.

[Lori Falchi]

Marcy,

I love that idea.

I remember in high school I did a drawing of a lion for the word "pusillanimous" to mean that in a kind of Wizard of Oz kind of way, I guess.

Word banks could work well to stimulate writing poetry or prose books with illustrations could be based in a thematic unit that is interdisciplinary or in a content area.

[Janet Hirshberg]

I have used a note card word bank box. Each word has it's own card. On one side is the word itself.The flip side is divided into 3 sections. I picture for the word, the second is a sentence using the word, and the third is the definition w/ part of speech. Kids use these and go through them using hint one, two or three to figure out the meaning of the word. You can do all kinds of games with differnt amount of points for knowing the word using less or more clues.

[Lori Falchi]

Thanks, Janet! That sounds like an interesting way to play with new words.

[Hardy Leung]

Lori,

Please check out Tagxedo. http://www.tagxedo.com

I wrote a document "101 Ways to Use Tagxedo" in which I describe many ways to use Tagxedo for educational use. For example, I have a slide about "Learning ABC" (toddler), a slide about "Early Childhood Learning", "Improving Vocab", "Making Language Art" (great for bilinguals), etc.

More than just those few slides, I also introduce many different techniques within the 101 ways that are applicable to education. The one great thing about Tagxedo for education is that you can customize it to the level or interest of your students.

If 101 is not enough, please also check out the document "47 Interesting Ways to Use Wordle" maintained by Tom Barrett. You'll now have 148 ways to use Tagxedo :D

-- Hardy Leung ([e-mail])

[Lori Falchi]

Great! Thanks, Hardy! I will check that out. I am already familiar with your amazing wordle document.

[Phyllis Ain]

I LOVED your presentation. I am going to try this!

[Marek Bennett]

The (NH) Monadnock Summer Lyceum recently featured an intriguing talk on vocab & ed by linguist James Paul Gee. He has a lot to say about how new card and video games help foster technical/academic language acquisition in early childhood & elementary ages... Here's the link: http://www.nhpr.org/node/33504

-- M

[Lori Falchi]

Wow! Thanks, Marek! That is great--I am familiar with Gee's work.

[Phyllis Ain]

I listened to the Gee piece on NPR. It was wonderful. Thanks.