Tierney & Readance: Chapter 8
1. What was the chapter about?
In this chapter, Tierney and Readance discuss the idea that vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension go hand-in-hand with each other because "Word knowledge is a requisite for reading comprehension: people who do not know the meanings of words are most probably poor readers." Although this quote seems a bit out of date, I do strongly believe that students whom are familiar with more vocabulary words are certainly going to have an easier time reading and understanding materials. As teachers, we are all aware of this and thus need to discover ways to help those students that unfortunately have not gained the same amount of vocabulary knowledge over the years. Tierney and Readance described seven strategies that teachers can use dying the instructional lesson to promote students' vocabulary development: possible sentences, list-group-label, contextual redefinition, feature analysis, word map, vocabulary self-collection strategy and Levin's keyword method.
2. What does this chapter tell you about teaching students?
This chapter tells us a lot about teaching students because it gives us a great insight into how we can successfully help them become, not only better readers, but improve their reading comprehension as well. The seven strategies talked about in this article indicate that many students have trouble determining the meaning of unknown words, relating these unknown words to their prior knowledge and using the context to make informed guesses of unknown words. These strategies are a way for teachers to help students with this confusion. This chapter also reminded me that many students can excel by simply being opened up to new vocabulary terms, which can be accomplished by using maps to promote independent vocabulary development. Finally, making the new words and information more visual to our students can also really help improve their reading comprehension level.
3. Can this chapter be applied in your content area?
Yes, this chapter can definitely be applied in my content area because although there is not a ton of reading in mathematics, there is a lot of vocabulary that most students are not familiar with. Some of these strategies described in the chapter could definitely be successfully implemented in a math classroom. For example, Feature Analysis is designed to help students improve their vocabulary and categorization skills, understand the similarities and differences in related words, and expand and retain content area vocabulary and concepts. This is exactly what a math teacher needs to implement in the classroom! This would help my students recognize the relationship among different vocabulary words and see how they some build upon each other, which is the exact realization I wish to see among my students!
Jenna,
ReplyDeleteI liked what you said about the importance of recognizing the relationship between vocabulary terms and how you would implement this in your classroom! Students can get so overwhelmed when they don't know the meaning of a word that they just shut down and don't try to figure it out. I'm sure you see this a lot in math as well! Home life is such a huge factor in vocabulary acquisition. Sometimes in my class, I'll say a French word that has an English cognate, but the students don't know the English vocabulary. For example, today I used the word, "obligatoire" whose cognate in English is "obligatory." There were several students in my 9th grade class who did not know the word obligatory, so I had to use other words to explain.
Good thoughts!