Isabel L. Beck

Increasing Young Low‐Income Children’s Oral Vocabulary Repertoires through Rich and Focused Instruction

This article reports on 2 studies with kindergarten and first‐grade children from a low‐achieving elementary school that provided vocabulary instruction by the students’ regular classroom teacher of sophisticated words (advanced vocabulary words) from children’s trade books that are typically read aloud. Study 1 compared the number of sophisticated words learned between 52 children who were directly taught the words and 46 children who received no instruction. As expected, children in the experimental group learned significantly more words. Study 2, a within‐subject design, examined 76 children’s learning of words under 2 different amounts of instruction, either 3 days or 6 days. In Study 2, the vocabulary gains in kindergarten and first‐grade children for words that received more instruction were twice as large. Student vocabulary was assessed by a picture test where students were presented with pictures that represented different words and were asked to identify which picture represented the word that the tester provided. The verbal test was similar but used a sentence description of a scenario instead of a picture. The instructional implications for which words to teach and how to teach them to young children are discussed.

Some effects of the nature and frequency of vocabulary instruction on the knowledge and use of words

TWO COMPONENTS of a successful vocabulary program, the nature of the instruction and the frequency of instructional encounters, were examined to determine their relative contribution in improving verbal processing skill. Fourth-grade children received one of three types of instruction: traditional instruction requiring only associations between words and definitions, rich instruction presenting elaborated word meanings and diverse contexts, or extended/rich instruction which added activities to extend use of learned words beyond the classroom. Frequency was manipulated by providing either 12 or 4 encounters with each word. Outcomes were measured on tasks of definition knowledge, fluency of access to word meanings, context interpretation, and story comprehension. High frequency yielded better results on all measures. As to type of instruction, extended/rich showed an advantage over rich in fluency of access and story comprehension, while rich showed an advantage over traditional in context interpretation and story comprehension. The interpretation of this pattern and its instructional implications are discussed.

Thinking Aloud and Reading Comprehension Research: Inquiry, Instruction, and Social Interaction

This is a review of research on thinking aloud in reading comprehension that considers thinking aloud as a method of inquiry, a mode of instruction, and a means for encouraging social interaction. As a method of inquiry, the analysis of verbal reports provided by readers thinking aloud revealed the flexible and goal-directed processing of expert readers. As a mode of instruction, thinking aloud was first employed by teachers who modeled their processing during reading, making overt the strategies they were using to comprehend text. Subsequently, instructional approaches were developed to engage students themselves in thinking aloud. Such endeavors revealed facilitation effects on text understanding. Current efforts to engage students in constructing meaning from text in collaborative discussions seem to indicate a new direction for thinking aloud research, one in which social interaction assumes increased importance.

Rethinking Reading Comprehension Instruction: A Comparison of Instruction for Strategies and Content Approaches.

A BSTRA C T Reports from research and the larger educational community demonstrate that too many students have limited ability to comprehend texts. The research reported here involved a two-year study in which standardized comprehension instruction for representations of two major approaches was designed and implemented. The effectiveness of the two experimental comprehension instructional approaches (content and strategies) and a control approach were compared. Content instruction focused student attention on the content of the text through open, meaning-based questions about the text. In strategies instruction, students were taught specific procedures to guide their access to text during reading of the text. Lessons for the control approach were developed using questions available in the teacher’s edition of the basal reading program used in the participating classrooms. Student participants were all fifth graders in a low-performing urban district. In addition to assessments of comprehension of lesson texts and an analysis of lesson discourse, three assessments were developed to compare student ability to transfer knowledge gained. The results were consistent from Year 1 to Year 2. No differences were seen on one measure of lesson-text comprehension, the sentence verification technique. However, for narrative recall and expository learning probes, content students outperformed strategies students, and occasionally, the basal control students outperformed strategies students. For one of the transfer assessments, there was a modest effect in favor of the content students. Transcripts of the lessons were examined, and differences in amount of talk about the text and length of student response also favored the content approach.

Revising Social Studies Text from a Text-Processing Perspective: Evidence of Improved Comprehensibility.

THE PURPOSE of the present study was to use a cognitive processing perspective to revise fifthgrade social studies texts, to describe those revisions, and to demonstrate their effects empirically. Four segments of text from a U.S. textbook about the period leading to the American Revolution and their revised counterparts were presented to 85 fourthand fifth-grade students. Students were presented with the text materials in individual sessions with an examiner and were asked to recall what they had read and to answer questions on the material. Students who read the revised text recalled more material and answered more questions correctly than students who read the original text. Differences in understanding between the two groups were also captured in qualitative analyses of recall protocols and question responses related to specific ideas in the text. Overall, the effects of the revisions demonstrate that a text-processing approach to creating comprehensible text is a viable one. Furthermore, the description of revision goes beyond how revisions have been described in past research by exposing the reasoning underlying the identification of problems and the changes made.

THE EFFECTS OF LONG-TERM VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION ON READING COMPREHENSION: A REPLICATION

A study that investigated the relationship between vocabulary instruction and reading comprehension was replicated and extended. The original study showed substantial gains in accuracy of word knowledge and speed of lexical access, but only marginal gains in comprehension. This latter result was attributable to methodological problems, and thus the comprehension measure was revised. In the present study, fourth graders were taught 104 words over a five-month period. Following instruction, these children and a group of uninstructed children matched on pre-instruction vocabulary and comprehension ability performed tasks to measure accuracy of word knowledge, speed of lexical access, and comprehension of stories containing taught words. Instructed children showed substantial advantage in all tasks. Reasons for these results, in contrast to studies that have failed to improve comprehension through vocabulary instruction, are discussed.

Vocabulary Development: All Contexts Are Not Created Equal

The Elementary School Journal Volume 83, Number 3 ? 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0013-5984/83/8303-0003

Focusing Attention on Decoding for Children With Poor Reading Skills: Design and Preliminary Tests of the Word Building Intervention

01.00 It is well accepted that the context that surrounds a word in text can give clues to the words meaning. The process of getting word meaning from context has been explored recently by several investigators. This research has shed light on such aspects of context as to what degree context can be said to consist of text information

Improving the comprehensibility of stories: The effects of revisions that improve coherence

This study examined the reading skills of children who have deficient decoding skills in the years following the first grade and traced their progress across 20 sessions of a decoding skills intervention called Word Building. Initially, the children demonstrated deficits in decoding, reading comprehension, and phonemic awareness skills. Further examination of decoding attempts revealed a pattern of accurate decoding of the first grapheme in a word, followed by relatively worse performance on subsequent vowels and consonants, suggesting that these children were not engaging in full alphabetic decoding. The intervention directed attention to each grapheme position within a word through a procedure of progressive minimal pairing of words that differed by one grapheme. Relative to children randomly assigned to a control group, children assigned to the intervention condition demonstrated significantly greater improvements in decoding attempts at all grapheme positions and also demonstrated significantly greater improvements in standardized measures of decoding, reading comprehension, and phonological awareness. Results are discussed in terms of the consequences of not fully engaging in alphabetic decoding during early reading experience, and the self-teaching role of alphabetic decoding for improving word identification, reading comprehension, and phonological awareness skills.

The Assessment and Characterization of Young Learners’ Knowledge of a Topic in History

TWO STORIES from basal readers were revised to improve their coherence without altering their plot. Although the revisions increased the difficulty of the passages as indexed by traditional readability formulas, they enhanced comprehension of both skilled and less skilled readers as indexed by recall and answers to forced-choice questions. Implications for assessing text difficulty are discussed.