Teaching and Learning Vocabulary: Bringing Research to Practice (review)

Wilkins (1972, p. 111) declared that 'while without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed,' and therein lies the value of the book I am reviewing. Teaching and Learning Vocabulary features presentations from a conference on vocabulary held in Dallas, TX, in October 2003. With a balanced focus on theory and practice, its 12 chapters address important issues in vocabulary learning for children, young adolescents, and second language learners. It is divided into three sections: how vocabulary is learned, instructional interventions to enhance vocabulary, and ways to choose words for instruction.

The editors begin the first section with recommendations proposed by the National Reading Panel in 2000. These include multiple exposures to new words; rich and varied contexts, including computer-assisted ones; direct and incidental teaching; and active engagement of learners, particularly low-SES learners and those whose English-language proficiency is low. Nagy continues with a chapter delineating causal links between reading comprehension and factors such as vocabulary size, background knowledge, verbal aptitude, and ease of access to printed material. He discusses implications for long-term instruction to improve reading, enrich connections between instructed words and prior knowledge, and facilitate contextual inferencing and metalinguistic analysis of unknown words. In chapter 3, in a comparison of oral and written language, Cunningham discusses how being read to promotes receptive recognition and how independent geared-to-ability reading helps learners derive word meanings via repeated exposures in different contexts. Completing this section is an article in which Scott presents implications regarding within-word factors (morphological structure, part of speech, concreteness of meaning), text variables (conceptual difficulty, helpfulness of context, density of other unknown words, repetition of key words), and sociocultural aspects (vocabulary size, world knowledge, and reading purpose of the reader) that influence the acquisition of new words.

In the section on vocabulary instruction, Stahl provides suggestions for preventing gaps in levels of word knowledge among children. He recommends providing definitional and contextual information, tying new words to known words, and explicitly teaching salient words before or during reading. He suggests showing learners how a word relates to other words, how it changes in different contexts, and how it is used in production. The next chapter presents a study by Calderon, August, Slavin, Duran, Madden, and Cheung involving low-SES Grade 2 students making a transition from L1 Spanish to L2 English instruction. In the experimental classrooms, teachers pronounced new English words and provided a definition and a sample sentence; learners repeated the word and engaged in oral and written activities for practice and review. Compared to control classes using a regular basal reader program, the experimental groups outperformed the control group, and their L1 reading skills improved as well. Chapter 7 discusses a successful vocabulary improvement project presented to fourth- and fifth-grade ESL learners, and chapter 8 describes a program called PAVEd for Success that was designed to improve the vocabularies of pre-kindergarten children. In the final chapter in this section, Baumann, Font, Edwards, and Boland report on how fifth-grade students trained to use prefixes and contextual clues showed a greater increase in vocabulary than those in a control group who read and responded to a children's book.

The third section of the book answers the question, How do I choose which words to teach? Beck, McKeown, and Kucan posit that Tier 1 words (known words with concrete meanings) and Tier 3 words (infrequently occurring words best learned in specific content areas) are not as suitable for classroom instruction. They suggest emphasizing Tier 2 words, which are frequent, useful in different contexts, easily connected to other words and concepts, and facilitative of conceptual understanding of the topic under study. Biemiller, reporting on empirical evidence that children learn specific word meanings in a roughly fixed order depending on their vocabulary size, not their grade level, suggests that primary-grade teachers introduce words that are known by about 30% of students in Grade 2...