Concept Development and Word Meanings

Children learn much vocabulary from listening to the speech around them. You can promote vocabulary growth by not "talking down" to your students. You should use precise terminology as you discuss things in class. You should encourage curiosity about words and their meanings to develop word consciousness (Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2002). Calling attention to excellent word choices in literature selections is a good method of fostering word consciousness. The book Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster by Debra Frasier offers an excellent vehicle for talking about word meanings and possibilities for misunderstanding words and their meanings.


Read-aloud sessions by both parents and teachers help students to build vocabulary knowledge. As parents read stories aloud to their children, they may casually define unfamiliar words or help the child make connections with the unfamiliar words and events and their everyday experiences. Teachers may have more structured plans for teaching vocabulary through read-alouds.


Generally, more concrete (direct) experiences with objects and ideas result in development of deeper understanding of the words associated with that object or idea. Eating fresh pineapple develops a sensory base for understanding the concept of pineapple that showing pictures of the pineapple cannot equal. Even describing the taste, appearance, and other characteristics of the pineapple for someone does not add enough sensory input to equal letting that person taste, touch, smell, and see the pineapple. Using manipulatives in class to work on vocabulary and concepts is a way to provide concrete experiences. For example, students can measure feet, inches, and yards with tape measures and rulers to develop concepts of length and measure cups, pints, and quarts with measuring cups for measures of volume. They can pour water on cotton balls to show absorption or stretch rubber bands to demonstrate elasticity (Petrick, 1992). Experiences that are not concrete are called vicarious experiences. Vicarious experiences do not involve all of the senses - perhaps sight alone is involved (as with still pictures) or sight and hearing (as with a videotape).


Words are of little use to people if they do not represent known concepts, for under these circumstances they are just meaningless sounds. Therefore, if we are to add words to children's vocabularies, we must ascertain if the related concepts are known by the children, and, if they are not known, we must attempt to develop them.


The concepts that people have are based on their backgrounds of experiences. Children with limited experiences have fewer concepts to which they can attach vocabulary terms. For these children, concept development becomes a natural part of vocabulary instruction.

Concepts develop in interrelated clusters. If you are trying to teach the concept of fishing, you have to relate such concepts as rod, reel, bait, hook, cast, line, and so on.


Words that have concrete referents (treadmill) are easier to learn than are abstract words (fitness). Words that evoke mental images (rhinoceros) are easier to learn than words that do not (jealous). Words that relate to students' experiences (thoroughbred for Kentucky students) are easier than ones that do not (tundra for Kentucky students). Structure words, such as what or though, are generally harder to learn than are nouns and verbs. Children in first grade generally have structure words in their listening and speaking vocabularies already, but may not yet have them in their reading and writing vocabularies. If all other things are equal, it is probably wise to teach first the words that are needed earliest or most frequently for completing school assignments or for activities in daily life.


Children may have less differentiated meanings for words than do adults. They may respond to the word take in the same way they respond to the word buy. They have the correct direction for the transaction, but do not include the necessary exchange of money. As time passes, they add more of the adult distinctions to the word meanings (Anderson & Freebody, 1981).