Michael F. Graves

Growth of Reading Vocabulary in Diverse Elementary Schools: Decoding and Word Meaning.

The authors charted growth of reading vocabulary for first- through fourth-grade students at three dissimilar elementary schools: School A, a suburban school enrolling While students who spoke standard English; School B, an inner-city school enrolling Black, dialect-speaking students; and School C, a semirural school enrolling economically disadvantaged, dialect-speaking Asian/Pacific students

What Is Academic Vocabulary

Strategies for Teaching Words Carousel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89 Making Choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97 Vocabulary Diagram . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Mapping Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Linear Arrays. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Content Links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Word Associations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Keyword Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Jeopardy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Independent Word-Learning Strategies Vocabulary Journal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Clue Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Using Dictionaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Th ink Aloud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Teaching Cognates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Chapter 2: Vocabulary Learning and Instruction

The orientation of this review is intensely practical. It is an attempt to describe what we know and what we need to learn in order to build vocabulary programs that are based on reasonably accurate empirical estimates of what students already know, what they need to learn, and what they can be taught. The scope of the review is, of course, limited. It deals largely with reading vocabulary, with studies of school-age children, and with published studies. It does not deal with the early history of vocabulary research, word recognition (a topic reviewed recently by Gough, 1984, and Johnson and Baumann, 1984), with readability (a topic reviewed recently by Klare, 1984), or with word lists and word frequency (topics that have not been reviewed recently, but which were excluded because of space limitations). Two themes will emerge as the chapter progresses. One is that although we have a good deal of information relevant to vocabulary instruction, there are a number of very basic questions to which we have almost no answers. The other is that there are a number of questions for which relatively definitive answers are possible and that speculative answers to these questions are not sufficient. The first section of this chapter deals with vocabulary size, depth of word knowledge, and assessing word knowledge. The second deals with the effects of vocabulary on reading comprehension and other verbal phenomena, the third with methods of teaching individual words, the fourth with generative vocabulary instruction, and the fifth with the vocabulary instruction currently

The effects of individualized, online vocabulary instruction on picture vocabulary scores: an efficacy study

Vocabulary knowledge is of fundamental importance to reading comprehension, and many students lack the vocabulary knowledge necessary to facilitate learning to read. A study was conducted to determine the effects of an individualized, online vocabulary program on picture vocabulary test scores. Elementary summer school students (N = 43), entering grades 2–4, who scored poorly on a vocabulary pretest were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. Students in the treatment condition received computer-delivered vocabulary instruction on a stratified sample of 100 words selected from 4000 of the most common words in written English. Posttest scores on a picture vocabulary test showed that students in the treatment condition outperformed control students by more than one standard deviation. The computer-adaptive, individualized instruction provided by this vocabulary program addresses a need for efficiency in remediation of vocabulary deficits. Further study is planned to determine whether improved vocabulary performance mediated by this computer assisted language learning (CALL) program might transfer to broader measures of vocabulary knowledge or reading comprehension.

Contextualizing the First-Grade Studies: What Is the Best Way to Teach Children to Read?.

The authors, including one of the authors of “The First-Grade Studies,” describe the historical context from which Bond and Dykstras work drew.

A Tutoring Program for Adolescents Seriously Deficient in Readinga

A highly structured tutoring project was used to teach reading to ten seventh and eighth grade students reading between the second and fifth grade level. Tutors for the program were college students. Instruction was not individualized. Rather, each student was placed in one of three consecutive programs accordant with his ability and proceeded through that program in a prescribed manner. Within a program, only pacing was individualized. If a student completed a program during the year, he began work in the next higher one. Results on the Spache Diagnostic Reading Scales indicated a mean gain of 1.4 grade levels. Results further indicated that nine of the ten students made gains of 1 year or better.

Postreading Questioning and Middle School Students’ Understanding of Literature

The study examined the effectiveness of a “story map,” a questioning technique (Beck & McKeown, 1981) for improving students’ understanding of literature. Though the story map idea was widely adopted as a student-initiated strategy, the original story map—a teacher-generated, postreading questioning framework—was never empirically tested. This study examined the effects of using three postreading questioning conditions with stories from middle school anthologies: the story map, anthology questions, and no questioning. Results indicated a significant difference for comprehension between both questioning conditions and no questioning but no significant difference between the story map and anthology question treatments. However, the story map condition had a more positive effect on students’ enjoyment of the stories and their feeling of success in understanding them than the other conditions.

A Quantitative and Qualitative Study of Elementary School Children’s Vocabularies

AbstractThis study employed a group test and individual interviews to investigate quantitative and qualitative aspects of students’ vocabularies. Subjects for the group test were 216 higher, middle-, and lower ability 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders. Subjects for the interviews were 8 high- and low-ability 3rd and 5th graders. All subjects were from a middle-class suburb of a large midwestern city. The group test consisted of two forms of a 36-item, multiple-choice test comprising words at various difficulty levels. Subjects received one form of the test as a reading test and the other as a listening test in a counterbalanced fashion. The interviews required subjects to give two meanings for words in isolation, identify two meanings of words presented in two contexts, and distinguish between the meanings of closely related words. An ANOVA on the group test indicated significant (p < .01) differences caused by grade, ability, mode, and word difficulty. On the interviews, students performed best at identifying mu...

Secondary Students’ Internalization of Letter-Sound Correspondences

AbstractThis study examined secondary students’ knowledge of eight types of letter-sound correspondences. Equal numbers of high, average, and low ability readers in grades seven, nine, and eleven were administered a forty- eight-item multiple-choice test that required them to identify the letter-sound correspondences in synthetic words. Results indicated that, in general, secondary students have mastered letter-sound correspondences. However, results further revealed that in the seventh and ninth grade low ability readers have not fully mastered certain correspondence types, while in the eleventh grade low ability readers’ knowledge of letter-sound correspondences is similar to good readers for all but one correspondence type.

Effects of Stresssing Oral Reading Accuracy on Comprehension.

Abstract Recently, authorities have argued that the traditional demand for accuracy in oral reading may in fact retard comprehension. This study investigates the validity of that argument. Thirty third‐grade students of average ability individually read aloud a 109‐word passage and immediately retold as much of it as they could remember. Half of the students (the high criterial group) were instructed to be very careful to pronounce individual words accurately, and half (the low criterial group) were instructed not to worry unduly about accurate pronunciation of individual words. Students’ readings and retellings were tape recorded. The dependent measures were comprehension (total propositions recalled), reading time, misses (hesitations of two or more seconds), and false alarms (words mispronounced). Results indicated significantly better comprehension (p < .05) and significantly faster reading times (p < .l) for the lower criterial group. The major implication for teaching is that overemphasizing accurac...