After reading Cunningham and Cunningham and Yopp and Yopp I've learned there are several different ways to teach vocabulary and word knowledge. In the Yopp and Yopp article the teachers had students pick what they thought were the ten most important words in a story and then describe the story in one sentence. I thought this example was just ok. There was probably a plethora of words that the students thought were important and other students didn't. I don't really think that helps a ton with learning new words and their meaning. Students could just pick words that they've seen frequently before. In the Cunningham and Cunningham article, they described having children make words from a list of letters. I actually really liked reading about this study because I use to do this on my own time and not in school. It was always fun to see how many words you could come up with from a list of letters or from another word. I also liked the fact that the teachers would increase the number of letters the students had to use so they couldn't just make words that were 3 or 4 letters every time. I think this study is way more creative and fun for students than having them pick out words in a story.
I can see where you think that students would "find the easy way out" and pick the words they have seen frequently so they aren't as challenged during the activity. But if the teacher pushes the students to "want" to learn the new vocabulary and makes the activity seem interesting, I believe the students would find words they didn't understand and this activity could become meaningful to them. The activity allows them to talk about these new words and discuss their different meanings by having to put them in sentences, and then taking it a step further by asking them to add to the ending or beginning to form other words. This effectiveness of this activity definitely depends on the teacher and the students.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with you about children choosing words that they are familiar with. I did not think of that while I was reading it, because like Megan mentioned, I was thinking students would want to learn new and exciting words. If the teacher explains the activity in a matter that makes it seem like an adventure or who can come up with an exciting word, then the activity becomes more of a quest rather than something that is boring.
ReplyDeleteI agree that letting a child circle the words they find important could cause a lot of confusion. Not every child knows what someone means by "important,: and their version of importance could be different than what is actually important in the texts. I did think the different color coding techniques were important that involved critical thinking. It gave students a variety of different ways to think about a passage.
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