Types of Vocabulary Learning (Broad and Specific)
What do you do when you encounter a word you don’t know while reading? Maybe you continue on, hoping the rest of the text will provide a clue. Or maybe you type the word into an online dictionary to find the definition. There are lots of different strategies people use to identify word meanings and increase their vocabularies.
Vocabulary is one of the five pillars of early literacy development, and it is a necessary part of understanding what we’ve read and expressing ourselves clearly to others.
In this video, we will describe some approaches to teaching vocabulary. We will also explain why it is important for students to know multiple strategies for identifying the meanings of unknown words.
Approaches to Vocabulary Instruction
Research has shown the importance of explicit vocabulary instruction. This includes both teaching the meanings of specific words and teaching strategies for identifying the meanings of unknown words when they are encountered in texts.
Let’s examine the variety of approaches to building vocabulary and identifying word meanings.
Literacy-Rich Environments
Incidental, or indirect, vocabulary learning occurs through everyday reading, writing, listening, and speaking activities. Frequent classroom discussions and reading a variety of text types are ways to expose students to new words and their meanings. It is also important to incorporate general academic vocabulary and content-related words into classroom discussions.
Definitional Approach
The definitional approach involves having students look up word meanings in a glossary or dictionary. Students are taught how to locate words alphabetically, use guide words, and identify the relevant meaning when multiple meanings are listed.
The definitional approach also includes memorizing lists of words and their meanings. There are limitations to this approach, however, due to the vast number of words in each language. Therefore, it is important for students to have strategies to determine the meanings of words they encounter in daily life.
Structural Approach
The structural approach focuses on identifying known word parts and their meanings, including prefixes, suffixes, and roots. For example, if students encounter the word biology, they can use knowledge of how bio means life and -ology means a field of study to determine the meaning of the word. Knowing the meanings of prefixes, suffixes, and roots also helps readers identify relationships between words with shared parts. They may recognize, for example, that biology, psychology, and ecology are all fields of study. Students may be asked to sort words into groups based on shared word parts. They may also create word trees with a word part in the center and words containing that part in the branches.
Contextual Approach
In the contextual approach, readers are taught to look at the surrounding text for clues about an unknown word’s meaning. Consider the following sentence and the context clues that can assist with defining the word famished.
The sentence indicates that the runner had just completed a physical activity, and he devoured, or quickly ate, a large snack. Based on these clues, one could guess that famished means extremely hungry.
Teachers may encourage students to underline context clues in the surrounding text. They may also teach different types of context clues, such as synonym and antonym clues, along with keywords that indicate their presence.
Categorical Approach
In the categorical approach, students sort vocabulary words into categories based on similar meanings. For example, students might sort a list of words into two categories: things found in a desert and things found in a forest. Sorting words into categories helps students form connections between related words.
Mnemonic Approach
With the mnemonic approach, a new vocabulary word is associated with a mental image, feeling, or similar-sounding word. When the word is encountered again, the association returns, reminding the student of the meaning. To assist students with making these associations, teachers may use image cards when introducing vocabulary words. They may also ask students to act out or draw pictures of definitions or make connections between words and personal experiences.
Importance of Using Multiple Approaches
These approaches all play a role in vocabulary learning. It’s important for students to have a variety of strategies to draw upon because there may be certain instances where one strategy is more effective than another.
For example, a student may encounter an unknown word with no context clues in the surrounding text. However, a known root may be present, making structural analysis a useful strategy.
In situations where no clues are found within the word itself or surrounding sentences, knowing how to use a dictionary is beneficial.
If the word is an abstract noun like victory, then remembering the way you felt when you overcame or won something may be more effective than structural analysis.
Knowing multiple strategies also allows students to cross check understanding. A student can use one strategy to identify the meaning of a word, then use another strategy to confirm this meaning is correct.
Review
Let’s review what we learned in this video.
Vocabulary instruction should include teaching the meanings of specific words and teaching strategies for identifying the meanings of unknown words when they are encountered in texts.
- Incidental vocabulary learning occurs when students learn new words and their meanings through everyday experiences.
- With the definitional approach, students look up word meanings and memorize them.
- With the structural approach, students look for known word parts, such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
- With the contextual approach, students look for clues about a word’s meaning in the surrounding text.
- With the categorical approach, students sort words into categories based on similarities in meaning.
- With the mnemonic approach, a new vocabulary word is associated with a mental image, feeling, or similar-sounding word.
- It is beneficial to use a variety of approaches, as each may be useful in specific situations.
Questions
Let’s go over a couple of review questions.
1. A class is solving a series of word problems that require either multiplication or division. The teacher observes that several students are selecting the wrong operation in each problem. She wants to help them recognize keywords that indicate which operation to use. Which approaches to vocabulary instruction may be most beneficial in this situation?
The teacher could use a contextual approach and ask students to underline clues about the operation in the question. For example, if the prompt describes starting with a whole cake that is shared among party guests, it would indicate division is warranted. She could also use a categorical approach and have students sort keywords that indicate multiplication, such as factor and product, and division, such as equal parts and quotient. These words could then be listed on a T-chart and displayed in the classroom.
2. A student encounters the following sentence: Due to the volume of work, I will not have the project completed on time.
She knows that volume has more than one meaning. What strategy can she use to determine the correct meaning of volume in this sentence?
Using contextual clues will be helpful in this situation. The student can identify clues in the sentence that indicate the correct meaning, such as not being able to complete the project on time. She can then consider the possible definitions of volume to see which makes the most sense before determining that volume refers to the amount of something in this context.
That’s all for this review! Thanks for watching, and happy studying!
