Reflection 7: Vocabulary Strategies (Tierney & Readance Chapter 8 and BBR Chapter 5)

Anyone who's tried his/her hand at doing makeup knows that even this art of face

painting requires quite a bit of vocabulary learning.

In Chapter 8 of Reading Strategies and Practices: A compendium  (Tierney & Readance) and Chapter 5 of Content-Area Literacy: Reaching and Teaching the 21st Century Adolescent (Tom Bean, Scott Baldwin, and John Readence), the authors list a number of strategies for teaching vocabulary. Vocabulary learning is a key part in just about any subject and field. As a student, I was never a fan of memorizing words. When given a vocabulary quiz, I would cram them the night before and commit them to long-term memory just long enough to make it through the test. As someone who personally struggles with learning vocabulary and finding the task motivating, I was eager to see what kinds of strategies these reading experts can give.

Constructing a sentence using the vocabulary
word is a part of the personal glossary method.

Four strategies listed in both chapters are possible sentences (first giving students a list of unknown words and known words and asking them to compose sentences, then give students a passage to read, and finally go back to the initial sentences to re-evaluate them), contextual redefinition (use context to guess vocabulary's meaning), feature analysis (use categorization to make distinctions among words), and word map/semantic mapping (using concept maps and hierarchical structure to help students understand vocabulary and concepts). Tierney and Readance give the following strategies: list-group-label (associate terms to topic and then group and label them), vocabulary self-collection strategy (students and teacher both select key vocabulary to be learned, then collect them into a vocabulary list, and extend the word knowledge), and Levin's keyword method (mnemonic strategy in which students come up with a keyword that looks or sounds like the word to be learned). Tom Bean, Scott Baldwin, and John Readence give personal glossary (looking up the definition and compose a sentence to make your own glossary), R^3 (read the word three times and the definition one time), verbal/visual word association (use a 4-box word association diagram), clues and questions (method for reviewing vocabulary by asking students to come up with fill-in-the-blank questions), etymologia (ask students to look into etymologies of words), morphologia (analyzing words based on the morphemes that make up the words).

By giving a bunch of strategies, the two chapters advocate using different methods for teaching vocabulary suited for different purposes/readings/subjects. Vocabulary learning is actually a big part of learning math. Some of the strategies than I can see being used in math include possible sentences (can possibly be used to assess common misconceptions of key terms), word map/semantic mapping (works to organize concepts), personal glossary (ask students to look up the definitions and compose their own glossary--a sure method for all lessons), R^3 (rehearse words a few times might help commit them to memory), verbal/visual word association (4-box method can be used to give non-examples and examples for geometry shapes/definitions), clues/questions (can be used to help students review key terms), etymologia (learning interesting word etymologies can be fun), and morphologia (analyzing morphemes that make up the technical terms to help understanding). As I was writing my math unit plan for another class, I find myself looking for more engaging ways to teach/review vocabulary terms such as frequency, histogram, outlier, interquartile range, and central tendency. An obvious method that's applicable is the personal glossary one. Also morphologia could be used for the word "interquartile." In the unit review part of the lesson plan, clues/questions can be used (students write the fill-in-blank questions for one another to answer). And finally, for particularly important key words, R^3 can be used in class to further help commit their sounds/meanings to long-term memory. However, with an exception to the etymologia method, I wonder how these strategies can be implemented to engage and motivate students (rather than bore them with dry memorization). After all, memorization in learning vocabulary is important, but it can be very dry.

Some "Fun" with Math Vocabulary