Robert Samsel

Reflection #2

Tuesday June 14, 2011

Chapters 2-3

In this section of the book I finally got to get into some of the meat and potatoes. There were several websites given that provided resource to enhance the development of vocabulary. Many of which were unknown to me, some of them were. By the end of high school a student could have a reading vocabulary of up to fifty thousand words. This made me pause and wonder how students get there. Several tools were highlighted. All of the tools were just another way to expose kids to vocabulary in a novel way. According to research it takes many repetitions to the same vocabulary in different contexts for it to become part of their reading vocabulary and many more exposures in order to become part of their working vocabulary.

Four key components were given to increase students’ vocabulary

1. Provide rich and varied language experiences

2. Teach individual words.

3. Teach word-learning strategies.

4. Foster word consciousness.

I’m not sold that all examples given in the book accomplish all of these goals so it is probably necessary to use more than one of them to teach vocabulary that will take time. Time that I hope won’t interfere with the amount of content that also needs to be learned.

Strategies:

I focused on the suggestions given and thought about how I might apply them in my world. I annotated in the magi's to that when I came back to it later I would be able to remember what I was thinking at that time and maybe even develop that idea further in the future.