that it’s time to go outside to play, and since it’s cold he’ll need to bundle up in a coat, mittens, and a scarf. More than likely, the toddler will run to the closet and pull out his coat, mittens, and scarf even though he may not be able to verbalize this himself. Similarly, students understand many more specific words that you use within classroom discussions than they use when speaking and writing. Our overarching goal in vocabulary instruction is to help you move words in students’ receptive banks to their expressive banks through direct instruction, indirect instruction, and the use of digital tools and games to review and practice with words. It’s only through accurate use of new words that students add them to their personal lexicons.
A robust vocabulary helps students achieve success. Students must encounter new words in order to build their vocabulary and their knowledge of various concepts. Conceptual understanding, along with both general and specific word knowledge, impacts learning at every level. In addition, when older students know the meaning of specific words and are able to put related words together during a unit of study, they can connect to new content more readily and remember more (Marzano & Simms, 2013). Conversely, students who are deficient in vocabulary face numerous obstacles. Their reading range is limited, their writing lacks specificity and voice, and their spoken language lacks range of word choice and may give others a negative or inaccurate first impression.
It is not only for the purpose of individual growth and achievement that we teachers need to address vocabulary learning more directly than we have in the past. Many educators are familiar with the various research studies that correlate low literacy with poverty, unemployment, and incarceration (Baer, Kutner, Sabatini, & White, 2009; Hart & Risley, 2003). While we certainly want each student we teach to reach his or her full potential, there is also a large-scale, societal benefit when students increase their literacy. Literate adults are more likely to be employed, so they contribute to the economy through expenditures and taxes. They are also more likely to be well educated, and this bodes well for their families, as well-educated parents provide social and material advantages to their children. During the Great Recession in the United States, those with higher levels of education fared best—an outcome tied to literacy success (Rampell, 2013). Well-honed literacy skills provide a cushion against many types of hardship in a person’s life. Effective vocabulary instruction is an integral piece of the puzzle that can help the young people we see every day in our classrooms become literate for life.
Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension
Vocabulary and its interconnected relationship with comprehension has been the focus of a great deal of research—both quantitative and qualitative—over many years. Decades of research reveal that vocabulary knowledge strongly correlates to reading comprehension. Landmark studies such as Frederick B. Davis’s (1944, 1968) factor analysis and reanalysis by others (Spearritt, 1972; Thurstone, 1946) reveal that adults who have greater word knowledge and score high on vocabulary tests also score high on tests of reading comprehension. In other words, even though reading comprehension is a complex process, word knowledge plays the most important role.
Vocabulary and word knowledge also play an important role in comprehension for students. It is so critical to comprehension that the National Reading Panel (2000) includes vocabulary as one of the five essential components—or building blocks—of reading. Vocabulary and comprehension are so commingled that the National Reading Panel (2000) reports that separating them “is difficult, if not impossible” (p. 239).
Early vocabulary development is critical, and research shows that a lack of word knowledge has lingering effects. For example, kindergarten students’ word knowledge predicts reading comprehension in second grade (Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 1999; Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 2002). Similarly, other researchers (Wagner, Muse, & Tannenbaum, 2007) find the same predictive ability persists from kindergarten to fourth grade. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich (1997) find that first-grade students’ vocabulary knowledge predicts their reading comprehension level even later, in the eleventh grade.
Not only is vocabulary knowledge important for comprehension, it also relates to one’s skills in writing. A student who reads frequently and possesses a large and varied vocabulary has many more words to choose from when writing. Although research on the connections between vocabulary and writing is sparse, one study shows that students who receive instruction in word consciousness use a greater number of rare words in their writing after instruction than before (Scott, Jamieson-Noel, & Asselin, 2003). The number of words a student knows greatly influences his or her verbal output, which is one of the first things other people, including teachers, notice. If you and your colleagues have discussed voice and word choice in writing with students, you likely know from experience that the best papers are the ones in which students use the most precise and specific words. These data all illustrate that students who enter school with deficient vocabulary knowledge seem to remain deficient.
Vocabulary Gaps and Literacy
Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley (2003), in their study of the vocabulary growth of three-year-old children from low-income families compared with toddlers from middle-class and professional families, find a stark and persistent difference in vocabulary knowledge and word acquisition between these groups. Hart and Risley (1995) estimate that students from professional families have been exposed to thirty million more words by age three than their low-income counterparts.
Some may wonder how such a large gap exists. In varied home settings, children’s language experience differs both in quality and number of words heard. For example, professional parents more routinely engage with their children, using a variety of more sophisticated words and a broader array of words than working-class and low-income parents (Hart & Risley, 1995). Hart and Risley (1995) note that children of professional families enter school with a vocabulary of about 1,100 words, whereas children of working-class families enter knowing about 700 words, and children of welfare families have only amassed about 500 words upon entering school. Simply put, young children’s language and social interactions closely mirror those of their parents. Putting it another way, “to grow up as the child of well-educated parents in an affluent American home is to hit the verbal lottery” (Pondiscio, 2014).
Unfortunately, the vocabulary gap in preschool-age children often starts them off in a game of catch up and keep up that compounds as they learn to read and later when they encounter increasingly difficult academic content. A large oral vocabulary helps students as they begin learning to read. Students with larger vocabularies tend to become better readers, enjoy reading more, and read independently with more frequency than students with smaller vocabularies, who struggle as readers and dislike reading (Stahl, 1999). Whether you teach upper elementary, middle, or high school, we suspect you know far too well the moans and groans of some of your students when independent reading time rolls around or textbook reading is required. Struggling readers actively seek to decrease their time and engagement with all sorts of text, trapping themselves in a world of simplistic vocabulary, limited content knowledge, and a distaste for reading for pleasure or information.
In addition, those students with broad vocabularies read more independently, which, in turn, exposes them further to words and additional vocabulary growth (Stanovich, 1986). Frequently referred to as the Matthew effect (Figurelli, 2015), reading volume makes a difference not only in terms of acquiring reading skills but also in deepening and broadening an individual’s word knowledge (Fielding, Wilson, & Anderson, 1986; Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985). And, of critical importance to learning, one’s vocabulary knowledge directly relates to reading comprehension. To sum it up, the “rich get richer” (Stanovich, 1986, p. 380).
We know vocabulary and word knowledge gaps widen as students mature through the grades. Research supports the urgency we should feel to positively influence our students’ understanding of a broad range of words. Given the importance of vocabulary, one would reason that schools would emphasize a comprehensive approach to vocabulary development—one that would shore up deficits and build students’
