Reflection 6

In the first reading for this week, by Camille L. Z. Blachowicz and Peter Fisher, it was surprising to hear the lack of attention that has been paid to vocabulary instruction. Such learning appears as if it would be seen as exceedingly beneficial to overall reading and writing proficiency.

A good point I noticed, in particular, was that it is important to recognize that simply because an individual does not have wide ranging vocabulary this does not imply an absence of the capacity to gain one. Instead, generally it points to a lack of experience and opportunity to become familiar and hear a larger number of words. Moreover, I appreciated how it was stressed that books are going to present one of the main sources of new vocabulary. In spoken language there seems to be less of a trend toward broad and expansive vocabularies at least in comparison to person’s written lexicon.

One activity that specifically caught my attention was the use of what the authors called a “‘word wall,’” in which students may tack up the words they encounter through their own experiences (Blachowicz, C. & Fisher, P., 2004, p. 3). Not only does this provide an adequate means of additional exposure, but also allows for students to become enthusiastic about language learning. Additionally, it supplies them the opportunity to truly interact with the different words if they each receive the opportunity to explain where they discovered this previously unknown term and how it was employed in the circumstance in which they caught a glimpse of it. This undertaking actually very much reminded me of another useful wall display, which was called a book boards, if I remember correctly, where a teacher’s pupils could fasten their reviews of each book they read to the classroom wall. Both these pursuits struck me as being highly advantageous exercises that could be easily incorporated throughout the day and school year, as a whole

Lastly, in this article, I once more was grateful for the emphasis on exploring an extensive span of texts. Encouragement to look through books covering an assortment of subjects permits students to garner familiarity with dozens of diverse words, while also giving them the chance to locate genres that align with their interests and requirement.

The piece by Ruth and Hallie Yopp, titled “Ten Important Words Plus: A Strategy for Building Word Knowledge”, expanded even further upon the necessity of having a strong vocabulary in promoting quality reading skills. It was through this reading that I encountered the knowledge that often the words that are recalled are those learned “incidentally” (Yopp, R. & Yopp, H., 2007, p. 157). This is actually a fact that I studied in another course this semester and I thought it both unexpected and not that what we actually remember more frequently are the details that we picked up without explicit instruction on those concepts. This seems a key element to recollect when teaching because it points to the magnitude of the effects of exposure.

Just as in the article we read by the same authors a couple of weeks ago, their examples of ways to include vocabulary instruction in the curriculum were unquestionably valuable. In the “strategy [they] call Ten Important Words”, I liked the focus on determining the contextually significant words and then comparing those that each student had pick with his or her peers’ choices  (Yopp, R. & Yopp, H., 2007, p. 158). Such an activity issues the chance for individuals to concentrate on the viewpoints of others and examine their decisions. In addition, having them rotate tasks, but not before mastering each challenge, was an outstanding way of enabling them to interact with the expressions and connect their past learning with what they were currently studying.

Finally, with respect to the endmost reading, I was glad to reacquaint myself with the notion of sounding out unfamiliar words based upon the rules you are already aware of. Although an obviously important ability, it is easy to forget that this is, in all likelihood, a skill that must be taught, when I have doing it unconsciously for so many years. My preferred activity from this section of the text was probably the one in which students were asked to accurately guess hidden words based almost entirely off reading into context clues. Such a capability will serve to be relatively profitable as students progress through their education and stumble across readings that are quite complex. Further, it necessitates attention to detail, a key expertise to have in order to be considered a competent reader.