Morning Sessions at the Reading Research Symposium
My first session this morning was with Dr. Jerry Johns (North Illinois University, former president of the International Reading Association). Dr. Johns looked at vocabulary in the context of West Virginia’s new content standards.
The single item that impacted me most was a slide on vocabulary deficits in children from welfare families. A 1995 study by Hart and Risley showed that the cumulative vocabulary of three year olds from welfare families (about 500 words) was less than half that of three year olds from families where the parent have professional jobs (about 1100 words). That points to the extent to which teachers need to play catch up with kids in poverty settings.
The second session this morning was Dr. Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert. She talked about strategic vocabulary selection – how to pick vocabulary words out of narrative and informational texts to serve as vocabulary words. Dr. Hiebert talked about the historic structure of English vocabulary – the Germanic words, the Romance words that entered the language with the Norman invasion, and the multitude of Greek words that have been brought into the language. The main instructional strategy that Dr. Hiebert advocated was teaching clouds of related words so that students build vocabulary around concepts instead of in isolation. It was a good session.
(You can find a few personal details about my day here.)
