![]() ![]() Students should be active in learning as well. Students will benefit from teachers’ searching out specialized and technical language, pre-teaching it and then reinforcing it throughout the lesson. Vocabulary instruction must be deliberate and in-context. Unless something is done, this gap will continue to grow throughout both the elementary and secondary years.For example, the bottom 10 percent of first graders we tested knew only about 1/2 of the 1,000 most frequent English words. Data (Graves, Sales, & Davison, 2009), gathered from a project titled The First 4,000 Words, indicate that some students entering school know even fewer words than Moats estimated.Moats (1999) estimated that linguistically disadvantaged children enter school knowing about 5,000 words compared to the more advantaged children knowing 20,000 words.Hart and Risley further estimate that these children enter school knowing about 1/2 as many words as their more advantaged peers.Hart and Risley (1995, 2003) estimate that by age 3, some less advantaged students have heard 30 million fewer words than their more advantaged peers.Students who may have markedly smaller vocabularies include special students, English-language learners, and students of poverty.Some Students Have Markedly Smaller Vocabularies In order to close that gap, the vocabularies of the students with small vocabularies must grow more than twice as fast as they did in the past. In other words, without intervention the vocabulary gap will continue to grow. Without some kind of intervention, students with smaller vocabularies would have vocabularies of 3,000 + 1,500 = 4,500 words. Suppose further that those with smaller vocabularies come to school knowing 3,000 words.Ī year later, students with average vocabularies would have vocabularies of 6,000 + 3,000 = 9,000 words. Suppose that students with average vocabularies come to school knowing 6,000 words. This translates to 10 words a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.This means that average students learn 3,000-4,000 words a year.The average high school graduate knows something like 50,000 words.The average sixth grade student knows something like 25,000 words.The average third grader knows something like 15,000 words.Teaching vocabulary can improve reading comprehension for both native English speakers and English Language Learners (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982) and English learners ( Carlo et al., 2004) ![]()
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