Images (videos, descriptions of mental pictures, or drawings)
• Drama (skits or pantomimes)
• Current events related to the term (news stories or magazine articles)
These techniques involve both linguistic and nonlinguistic ways of interacting with a term. Depending on the amount of time a teacher has, each of these types of examples can be extensive or brief. For instance, to highlight the first feature of function that the teacher identified (a function expresses a relationship between two measurements), the teacher tells students a story about how her mom taught her to cook rice. She explains that for every cup of rice, she had to add two cups of water, so two cups of rice needed four cups of water, three cups of rice needed six cups of water, and so on. She could visually graph the relationship between how many cups of water are needed for a specific number of cups of rice, as in figure 2.1, explaining that it is called a linear function because it creates a line on the graph.
Figure 2.1: Example of a linear function.
To highlight the other feature of function that she identified as important (different functions express different types of relationships), the teacher first reminds students of the phrase “the quality of the food is a function of how hungry you are” from their previous discussion and points out that the phrase means that the hungrier you are, the better food tastes. This approach requires relatively little time. If the teacher has more time, she could play a video that shows the frequency of sound waves at different pitches, pointing out that as the frequency increases, so does the pitch. Finally, she might ask students to mentally picture a group of basketball players lined up according to height and ask them to guess which ones weigh the most.
In summary, step 1 involves describing and explaining the important features of a term to students after determining what students already know about the term. Description and explanation of each important feature should be accompanied by examples of that feature. Depending on the amount of time a teacher wishes to spend in this first step, the examples can be abbreviated or more in depth.
Step 2: Ask Students to Restate the Description, Explanation, or Example in Their Own Words
Steps 2 and 3 of the process ask students to respond to the teacher’s description, explanation, or example of a new term by expressing it in their own way, both linguistically (step 2) and nonlinguistically (step 3). These steps are crucial to vocabulary learning because they ask students to actively process the new information provided by the teacher in step 1.
In step 2, the teacher asks students to record their own descriptions, explanations, or examples in their vocabulary notebooks. It is important that students do not simply copy the teacher’s description but instead think about how they would describe the new term and consider situations or circumstances in their own lives that exemplify the term. For example, a student defining the term function might write, “A function tells how one group of numbers is matched up with another group of numbers.” Another student might write, “Functions tell what happens to a measurement when another measurement changes.” At this stage, students’ descriptions and explanations may be rudimentary. This initial simplicity is to be expected and, as long as major errors or misconceptions are avoided, is acceptable during this step. As students explore a word and learn more about it, they can return to their initial explanations to refine, clarify, and add to them (this revision process is further explained in step 4).
Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Representations
Within their framework of dual coding theory, Mark Sadoski and Allan Paivio (2001) suggested that information is stored in the brain in two forms: logogens and imagens. Logogens are storage packages that use language; imagens are storage packets that use pictures or images. For example, information about the vocabulary word narrator could be stored in both ways. A logogen might contain sentences that use the word, other words related to the word, titles of stories or plays that feature a prominent narrator, or other language-based information, such as that shown in figure 2.2 (page 20).
In contrast, a student’s imagens would contain image-based information about the word narrator. These images are often very rich and might include sounds and smells associated with a concept, in addition to mental pictures. Imagens will be discussed more fully in step 3.
Notice that in figure 2.2, each bit of information is connected to other bits of information. This is referred to by linguists as a propositional or semantic network (Clark & Clark, 1977; Kintsch, 1974, 1979; Tulving, 1972; van Dijk, 1977, 1980; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Over time, as students accumulate experiences and store them in propositional networks, the networks become increasingly generalized (Tulving, 1972). For example, a student who has seen Our Town performed might associate the word narrator with that particular experience until he or she sees A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which also features a narrator figure. Then, the same student might hear or see a musical piece with narration such as Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra or Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals. As his or her experience broadens, the information that the student attaches to the idea of narrator becomes more generalized.
Figure 2.2: Language-based information (logogens) for the word narrator.
As noted previously, step 2 focuses on the linguistic side of description and explanation; students create logogens for a term by describing, explaining, and exemplifying it in their own words. If students have trouble formulating their own descriptions, explanations, or examples of a term, the teacher can help in several ways. Perhaps the simplest is to offer further description and explanation to the students. The teacher might ask questions that prompt the student to think of examples from his or her own life that exemplify the term. Additionally, the teacher could ask students to form pairs or small groups to discuss the term and share examples of it in their own lives. If a student is still stuck, the teacher might ask him or her to complete step 3 (creating a nonlinguistic representation for the term) before returning to write a linguistic description of the word.
Vocabulary Notebooks
Vocabulary notebooks are a place where students can record and revise information about vocabulary terms. Many teachers and schools ask students to keep academic notebooks in which they record information related not only to vocabulary but to all the information presented in their classes. Whether students keep academic notebooks or vocabulary notebooks (or a combination of both), the purpose is the same: students record new information using words and images and return to revise and augment that information as their knowledge about a topic or term grows and deepens. Research has shown that the use of notebooks positively affects student achievement (Dunn et al., 2007; Gifford & Gore, 2008; Marzano, 2005, 2006).
Vocabulary notebooks can be created and organized in various ways. We recommend that the area (which may be a quarter-page, a third of a page, a half-page, or a whole page) for each vocabulary term include a place to record the following elements:
• The term
• The academic subject the term is associated with, if applicable (for example, ELA or mathematics)
