Chapter 9: Vocabulary

Chapter 9 offers many suggestions on how to move away from the traditional vocabulary instruction that teachers have used for years, memorization. I particularly enjoyed this chapter because so often students are learning words that they will probably never use just to pass the vocabulary test on Friday, and then forget the words by Friday afternoon. I remember as a student memorizing words upon words that I have rarely ever used. I probably wouldn’t even be able to put them into a sentence in the proper context because I was only concerned with getting an A on the spelling test. So what can teachers do to get past the old-school vocabulary memorization strategy?

Beers provides many useful suggestions in this chapter. It is paramount that teachers find interactive, fun ways for students to learn new vocabulary that will be beneficial to future reading and writing. One idea that I really liked from this chapter was in lesson 2: teaching students how to use the context as a clue requires that students see relationships among words and can make inferences about the passage. In my field experience, my students get all of their vocabulary words for the week from the text that they are engaging in that particular week. I believe this is really helpful for them, as they are seeing their vocabulary words being used in a real text. My field experience cooperating teacher introduced to me to an activity that our students really enjoyed. It is called Vocabulary CPR. (Context, Product, Resource). In this activity students use the context of the word to figure out the meaning. They then use a resource to identify the definition of the word. This has been very useful for my students, and these are students who have special needs.

I believe there are numerous ways to make vocabulary instruction fun and meaningful. It is up to the teacher to decide how to do so. Beers provides us future teachers with many great ideas pertaining to vocabulary instruction. I will definitely use these as a reference in my own classroom one day.