Vocabulary in English/Language Arts Classrooms

Two primary goals of reading novels, short stories, plays, and poetry is to gain insights into the human condition and to participate vicariously in the text worlds authors create. To accomplish these goals, readers must understand the words they encounter. Understanding vocabulary, then, is the means to the end of literary insights and experiences. Understanding vocabulary is not the end.

Effective English teachers perform a balancing act when addressing vocabulary: they work at developing word understandings while keeping those understandings subservient to the larger purposes for which students read. They achieve balance before students read by teaching the specific word meanings needed to grasp overall passage meanings. Effective English teachers achieve balance after reading by focusing attention on the key words that elicited the messages and experiences students gained. This balancing act fits situations involving single passages as well as multiple passages.

Single Passages

Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind, is a good novel to consider effective ways to promote vocabulary when students are reading a single passage.  Vocabulary learning readily can be folded into the study of this piece of literature.

Before students read Shabanu, introducing unfamiliar words that are crucial to understanding a section but are not fully explained is a good way to balance vocabulary and passage understandings. To illustrate, desert oases play a large role in Shabanu. Readers who lack clear and extensive understandings of this term risk substantial difficulties with the novel because it assumes readers already know about oases. Presenting the word in depth to students before they read the book is appropriate. As part of the introduction to the novel, you display oasis before the class and call attention to its pronunciation, then develop in-depth knowledge of its meaning. You ask students to call up what they already know about oases, present pictures and videos of them, and create analogies. You connect this individual term to the overall novel by explaining how it is a central part of the setting.

Folding vocabulary instruction into the study of Shabanu also can be done in the during- and after-reading phases. Asking students, “What is the most important word in this section?” and discussing their choices goes far in promoting active comprehension and in-depth vocabulary learning. A student who selects storm for the scene in which Shabanu’s grandfather dies might focus on the denotations and connotations of this word. What exactly is a storm? Does storm refer to a physical weather disturbance or to characters’ turmoil? How can personal relationships or the course of one’s life be stormy?

If students are maintaining response journals for Shabanu, some of the writing prompts can highlight vocabulary. Offering a menu of prompts allows readers to select a vocabulary response format they find most productive. For instance, students illustrate the meanings of three words from a chapter (e.g., show people wearing chadors and turbans or having their bodies painted with henna). They present word families (pilgrim, pilgrimage; nomad, nomadic). They maintain a list of “words I should learn more about” for weekly follow-ups, or they complete vocabulary self-assessment scales of words that peers select. Students maintain a “language gems” section in their journals for recording vivid comparisons, strong verbs, and other phrases they find compelling.