How Can I Help?
As a beginning teacher it is important to understand that its integral to a student’s learning that the information that they are receiving is relevant to them, that it has a connection to what they already know, and is scaffolded from there. This is especially true for introducing new words into their vocabulary.
There is no use in introducing new words into a students’ vocabulary if they have no understanding of its definition or how to use it appropriately. Scaffolding, with teachers’ assistance, to add new words to their vocabulary by linking current known words is one effective way of word introduction. These new words may be from word families, or synonyms of words that the student is already familiar with. We know through lots of research that scaffolding is an extremely effective way of learning and introducing new material to students.
Academic words, for example scientific terminology that is infrequently used by students in their day to day lives, are hard words to introduce. They often don’t have a lot of relevance to a student but “academic word practice should be and essential component of any comprehensive literacy program” (Townsend & Keirnan, 2015, p.113) as it becomes essential to know these words for comprehension purposes as they continue through their studies.
Another way of introducing new vocabulary is ensuring that, if it is not already known to the student, then it becomes familiar. One way of doing this is with activities such as ‘In The Media’ (McKeown et al. 2013). This activity is designed to help students with unfamiliar words. It gets the students to search for words on their list in the media, and this lets the students become familiar in with these new words in a variety of contexts. This ensures that the learnt words are heard in a variety of different scenarios so that many of the varied meanings of the new words can be understood. This task also ensures that the student perceives the words to be useful to them in everyday life, and this aids learning.
There is no use in introducing new words into a students’ vocabulary if they have no understanding of its definition or how to use it appropriately. Scaffolding, with teachers’ assistance, to add new words to their vocabulary by linking current known words is one effective way of word introduction. These new words may be from word families, or synonyms of words that the student is already familiar with. We know through lots of research that scaffolding is an extremely effective way of learning and introducing new material to students.
Academic words, for example scientific terminology that is infrequently used by students in their day to day lives, are hard words to introduce. They often don’t have a lot of relevance to a student but “academic word practice should be and essential component of any comprehensive literacy program” (Townsend & Keirnan, 2015, p.113) as it becomes essential to know these words for comprehension purposes as they continue through their studies.
Another way of introducing new vocabulary is ensuring that, if it is not already known to the student, then it becomes familiar. One way of doing this is with activities such as ‘In The Media’ (McKeown et al. 2013). This activity is designed to help students with unfamiliar words. It gets the students to search for words on their list in the media, and this lets the students become familiar in with these new words in a variety of contexts. This ensures that the learnt words are heard in a variety of different scenarios so that many of the varied meanings of the new words can be understood. This task also ensures that the student perceives the words to be useful to them in everyday life, and this aids learning.