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There’s no way around it-teaching vocabulary is hard. From trying to decide which words to teach through planning, delivery, and beyond, there’s just so much going on when it comes to teaching vocabulary.
This is all compounded by the fact that we simply cannot teach enough vocabulary. No, really. It is impossible for us to explicitly teach all the vocabulary words our students will need to know in their lifetime. Daniel Graves tells us that “Once in school, a child’s reading vocabulary is likely to soar at a rate of 3,000-4,000 words a year, leading to a reading vocabulary of something like 25,000 words by 8th grade, and a reading vocabulary of something like 50,000 words by the end of high school”(Graves, 2016, p.4). We cannot and we should not attempt to explicitly teach this volume of words.
It can be disheartening to know that you are unable to explicitly teach everything your students need to know in regards to vocabulary. What we must do, then, is a few things. First, we need to make sure the words we ARE explicitly teaching are worth our time. Next, we need to teach students strategies for figuring out unfamiliar words and helping them to understand word relationships. Finally, our classrooms and schools need to be places where words are celebrated, enjoyed, sought after, and used.
Don’t worry. If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. But, we’re going to break down each of these sections.
There’s two books that have shaped and reshaped my understandings of vocabulary instruction.
The first is Bringing Words to Life* by Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan. This is the book that revolutionized the way I thought about which words I should teach my students. Their discussion on Tier 1, 2, and 3 words has made me a better teacher. The book has so much more than just choosing which words to teach and is one that every teacher (not just reading teachers!) should read. Content area teachers could find amazing ways to implement vocabulary strategies to improve reading comprehension!
The second must-have is The Vocabulary Book by Michael Graves. This book heavily influenced this blog post. If you want to understand the different components of vocabulary instruction, the research we have about vocabulary instruction, explicit teaching strategies, and so much more, you’ve got to read this book.
Pro Tip: I prefer having my professional development books on my Kindle. Why? That way, I can highlight and easily find quotes I’m looking for. I also like that there’s a search feature, so if I’m thinking “what was it that they said about xyz,” I can just digitally search. Having professional development books on Kindle has allowed me to find information I need a lot faster than with physical copies. You can also highlight in different colors, so I have colors for important information, things I want to post on social media, and a third color for articles I want to later look up. If I’m working on specific presentations or projects, I can use a color specifically for those projects!
When it comes to vocabulary, simply teaching a few words a week will never result in a large academic vocabulary for our students. We must remember that it is not just one single activity, but creating an environment that gives children multiple opportunities to produce and receive vocabulary words while listening, speaking, reading, and writing that will produce students with large academic vocabularies.
Let’s discuss the different ways children can “know” a word. At the lowest end of the continuum, students can have no knowledge of a word. While they may be able to read it, they have no concept of what the word means. Next, a child may have knowledge of a word within a very specific context. For example, if a student has read a story and can understand how the word works within that story. Students with this kind of understanding of a word will most likely not understand it if it comes up again in another text in a different context.
The third level of knowledge is knowing a word, but not really being able to readily express that word in speaking and writing. The last level of word knowledge is “rich, decontextualized knowledge of a word’s meaning, its relationship to other words, and its extension to metaphorical uses”(Graves, 2016, p. 91). At this last level, that is when children (and adults) can “own” a word.
No single language experience can take a child from not knowing a word to the deep kind of understanding that allows a child to both understand a word and utilize it appropriately. That is why our children need to have a wide variety of language experiences.
Whenever you pause reading to explain a vocabulary word, that is providing students with a language experience. When you use sophisticated language in your discussions, that is a kind of language experience. Explicit teaching of word meanings, word parts, and word learning strategies are all experiences that will help your students get closer to the goal of knowing a lot of words well. Just because we cannot get to the final level of understanding in one sitting, it doesn’t mean that each language experience we provide isn’t valuable. Every language experience has the potential to pull student’s understandings of words further along on that continuum of knowledge.
One additional thing to be aware of is the role of wide reading in our children’s vocabulary development. Graves tells us that “since most words are learned incidentally, students need to be immersed in rich reading, listening, discussion, and writing experiences throughout the school day”(Graves, 2016, p. 69).
Independent reading is a hot topic. When balanced literacy was the preferred instructional method, independent reading was placed at the forefront. All children, regardless of age or ability level, were given time to read. When I taught 4th grade, my students had about 30 minutes of independent reading time. When I taught 1st grade, it was much the same (look, I don’t know what they were doing either, but I do know it wasn’t actually reading).
Giving large amounts of independent reading time to students who cannot read is not just pointless, but also counterproductive. It is a waste of critical instruction time. But, students cannot achieve large vocabularies without wide reading. So, once students can read, we must give them time to read.
Just letting students “today and every day” go off and be readers will not cut it. We must also give them strategies for what to do when they do not understand a word.
I used to think of teaching context clues as just another thing I had to teach. I didn’t see the value in it, so the majority of my instruction around context clues was worksheet based. When it comes to morphology, I always knew its value in helping students to uncover unknown words, but I didn’t always make the transfer to new readings as explicit as it could be. Now, I recognize the immense importance of providing children with strategies for figuring out unknown words while reading.
When students are reading, they will come across unfamiliar words. Teaching context clues and morphology is a way that we can give student strategies for figuring out the meaning of those unknown words. Please note: these are not strategies for decoding words, but strategies for understanding words.
Framing context clues as vocabulary changed the way I thought about teaching context clues. It’s not about giving students worksheets to see if they can pick out the word that is an antonym. Instead, it’s teaching students that authors often leave clues to a word’s meaning right in the passage. And that good readers are able to use those clues to get a basic gist or connotation of a word.
Keep in mind, students will most likely not read a word and have that deep, decontextualized understanding that Graves speaks of. Instead, what we are hoping for when students use word learning strategies on their own is that students can figure out enough about the word that meaning is not disrupted. Teaching context clues is about teaching students a strategy that they can transfer to their own reading.
For example, imagine a student was reading a book and came across the word “debilitating” in the following sentence: The flu can have debilitating effects, leaving people so weak and exhausted that they struggle to get out of bed for days.
Using context clues, the student is not going to be able to produce a definition. What they can get from this sentence, though, is that debilitating has a negative connotation. We know from the sentence that the flu may leave people weak, exhausted, and struggling to get out of bed. Thanks to those general context clues, we can infer that debilitating is something bad.
And that could be enough for this passage. But, if we have done a good job in helping our students to transfer their learning, the next time a child comes across debilitating in a text (as a part of wide reading, of course), they will perhaps move a little further on that continuum of knowing a word.
For me, teaching morphology is that beautiful intersection on the reading rope (Scarborough, 2001) where word recognition and language comprehension begin to interweave.
In the primary grades, we teach phonics so that students can read, spell, and understand single-syllable words. At the same time, we are also teaching vocabulary to our students, typically through well-crafted read-alouds. In the primary grades, however, the majority of the words that students CAN read are words that are already in their oral language.
It is when we arrive at multisyllabic words and morphology where we can really dig deep at the meaning level. Morphology is the study of morphemes, which are the smallest unit of meaning in our language. The word construction has 3 morphemes: con, struct, tion. Each part carries meaning, with con meaning “together,” struct meaning “to build”, and ion meaning “the act of.” When we teach a morpheme, we are not just teaching students one word. We are teaching them a meaningful unit that they can they transfer to other words when they are reading.
So, morphology isn’t just about finding out if they can read words with “struct.” It’s reframing it to can we help children to understand word parts so that when they are reading on their own, they can use them to understand a word and preserve comprehension? After all, comprehension is always the end goal.
When you think about teaching vocabulary, you most likely think about explicitly teaching new words to students. Remember, we cannot explicitly teach all the words students need to know. Because of this, we must remember that the words we do teach should be powerful, high-utility words that students will see in a variety of written text.
When explicitly teaching new words, there’s a few components we want to include (Graves, 2016). First, when we are presenting new words to students, we want to give them a kid-friendly definition. Next, we need to allow students to see the target word in context, not just in isolation. I like to give 2-3 sentences that use the word. We also want to give students multiple opportunities to both see and use the word. If we don’t ask students to use and process the words, we will never reach the deep understanding we eventually hope for with the vocabulary words we use. (I wrote a blog post where I go deep into my vocabulary planning and share the template I use.)
Word consciousness is a difficult topic, because I can’t just tell you to go and “teach word consciousness.” According to Graves, word consciousness “refers to an awareness of and interest in words and their meanings”(2016, p. 8). Students who are word conscious notice cool words when they are reading, they actively search for meaning of words they don’t know, and they seek to find the perfect words when they are writing. If children aren’t excited about words and don’t see the value in them, their vocabulary learning will suffer. And remember that vocabulary and comprehension are inextricably linked. But, if we can’t just assign word consciousness, what do we do?
Word consciousness is about creating a culture where words are used, celebrated, and explored. A word conscious classroom has a variety of books that celebrate words. The classroom library is stocked with texts for wide reading. The teacher celebrates fun words they find in read-alouds and in everyday experiences. Each time we stop and model excitement for words, that helps to build word consciousness with our students.
Even a school can create word consciousness throughout the building. For years, my previous school used Wordy Wednesday to help the entire school think about words every day. Promoting this kind of environment can be hard work, but when a school works together to celebrate language, everyone wins.
Vocabulary isn’t just about teaching individual words. We should also provide students with more opportunities to expand their semantic networks by helping them understand how words relate to one another and the multiple ways a single word can be used.
For example, teaching students a word’s synonyms and antonyms helps deepen their understanding not just of that word, but of related words as well. Using a tool like the Frayer Model, which prompts students to identify synonyms and antonyms, allows us to expand word learning from a single term to a broader network of connected words. While we don’t expect students to instantly develop rich, decontextualized knowledge, we are steadily building their understanding of both individual words and their relationships to others.
We also need to explore multiple-meaning words with students. I’m not just talking about how a bat can be a flying mammal or a stick used to hit a baseball. We need to go deeper, helping students recognize more abstract or less obvious meanings of words. We’ve all seen the dictionary definitions that have 4, 5, or even 10 meanings. But how often do we go past learning the definition that best matches the need we have now, then never revisiting the word again? What if the ONLY understanding a child had of a word was that single definition. Just think how comprehension might change if you have a very contextually-dependent understanding of a word.
Take the word strike, for example. It can mean to hit something, but it can also refer to a work protest, a missed attempt in bowling, or even a sudden discovery, like striking gold. If a student only learns one definition and never revisits the word, they might struggle to understand it in a different context. Teaching these nuanced meanings helps students make sense of complex texts, especially when encountering figurative language, academic vocabulary, and subject-specific terms. When we explore multiple meanings as a tool for building vocabulary, we equip students with the skills to think critically about words, strengthening both their reading comprehension and overall communication.
If you’ve made it to the end of the longest blog post I’ve ever written, thank you. I know how multilayered and multifaceted vocabulary instruction can be, and I hope that this overview of the components was helpful for you. Just remember, vocabulary instruction that is this involved isn’t going to be achieved overnight.
Instead, choose one of the ideas I’ve discussed and just start trying it out. If you’re not explicitly teaching vocabulary words, I’d start there. Moving forward, you could begin to incorporate word learning strategies like morphology and context clues. Then, work towards building a classroom (and maybe even a school) that celebrates words. And don’t forget, helping your students to understand word relationships is key as well.
It’s okay to start small. In fact, it’s the only way I recommend starting.
Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction. New York, NY: Guilford Press Book/Childcraft International.
Graves, Michael F. (2016). The vocabulary book: Instruction & learning. New York: Teachers College Press
Scarborough’s reading rope: A groundbreaking infographic. International Dyslexia Association. (2018, April 4).
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Savannah Campbell is a K-5 reading specialist. She has taught her entire 12-year teaching career at the school she went to as a child. She holds two master’s degrees in education from the College of William and Mary. Savannah is both Orton-Gillingham and LETRS trained. Her greatest hope in life is to allow all children to live the life they want by helping them to become literate individuals.
Savannah Campbell is a K-5 reading specialist. She has taught her entire 12-year teaching career at the school she went to as a child. She holds two master’s degrees in education from the College of William and Mary. Savannah is both Orton-Gillingham and LETRS trained. Her greatest hope in life is to allow all children to live the life they want by helping them to become literate individuals.
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