It’s really this simple: If students are to comprehend what they read, they have to understand the meaning of the words used in the text. Teachers, therefore, should explicitly teach students the words they need to know if they are to truly grasp the content of a story. Take the word “dinghy,” for example. Students [...]

Hilda Taba’s time-tested strategy (1967) called List-group-label is a great way of helping students connect to their own background knowledge and organization skills. This activity can be used with students of any level, in any content area and with any degree of proficiency. Give students a topic and ask them to brainstorm all of the [...]

A fun way to reinforce new vocabulary is to list 30 words that students have learned on the white board and ask students to place 24 of the words randomly on their own “Bingo”card. The center space is the “free” space just as in traditional Bingo. You then read the definition only of the words [...]

I hear a lot of comments from 4-12 teachers that students have difficulty with the vocabulary in their content area. One of the best ways to help students learn vocabulary is to identify the key affixes (prefix, suffix and root word parts) for your content area and directly teach this to students. For example, a [...]

One of the characteristics that separate good readers from poor readers is the size of a person’s vocabulary. As teachers, we can help build our student’s vocabularies in one of three ways: the first way is by promoting wide and extensive reading in the classroom. The second way is by encouraging students to experiment and [...]