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Building Knowledge of Language

Building Knowledge of Language

In classrooms where students have learned to be metacognitive about their reading processes, their practice thinking about their thinking makes it natural for them to treat language as an object of thought, to be metalinguistic as well as metacognitive. With a focus on thinking about language, students learn to identify and analyze patterns in how words, sentences, paragraphs, and related paragraphs work—and then apply them. Over time, they build greater fluency with a broader range of language patterns, as well as a disposition to reflect on and analyze unfamiliar words and novel syntax. They gain greater control of academic English.

For the students in Cindi Davis Harris’s community college developmental English class, “metalinguistics” became one of their most important vocabulary words, one they put to work in a daily routine of chunking sentences, using knowledge of word forms or morphology, and keeping records in reading journals of instances when using their metalinguistic knowledge helped them understand the text they were reading (see Classroom Close-Up 8.9).

Even charged with teaching a vocabulary course that included a predetermined list of words, Cindi Davis Harris did not view vocabulary learning as an activity focused on learning particular words. She taught students how to be word learners. The massive amounts of input needed to acquire knowledge of particular words argues against any other approach; by some research estimates it takes at least seven meaningful encounters with the same word in different contexts to learn that word. Students could never acquire the amount of vocabulary they need from explicit instruction alone. They need to learn word-learning strategies and how to acquire vocabulary during extensive reading. It is through “incidental” learning of new words from context that students gain the greatest amount of vocabulary growth, by far.

Word-learning strategies give students an important boost to their “incidental” learning of new words. Developing a Word-Learning Strategies List with students helps them to surface and share ways to approach unfamiliar vocabulary. Building such a list is an opportunity as well for students to build the habit of thinking metacognitively and metalinguistically about vocabulary. The Reading Strategies List (see Chapter Four) developed in most Reading Apprenticeship classrooms will naturally include a few word-learning strategies, which can be transferred to a Word-Learning Strategies List to get it started. Then, as students find themselves using different approaches to understanding new words, these strategies can be added to the list.

Teaching students to become effective word learners begins with teaching them to be “word detectives” and make judgments about the words they need to learn. Not all unfamiliar words can or should be the focus of deliberate attention, but because many students have a tendency to read past unfamiliar words, the first step is supporting students to monitor their comprehension. For example, when a group of three girls in Will Brown’s Introduction to Chemistry class claim they had no problems with the text they just read, all the same, Will asks them to pick out a few words they may have “read past.” The girls stall, so Will suggests the term “substantially” from the text. Because they cannot explain its use, Will advises them of the importance of being aware of choosing to read past unfamiliar words:

Sometimes you might let words like that go, but I want you to bring that to a conscious level. I want you to make to a conscious decision whether to skip a word or not.

Once students are deliberately noticing unfamiliar words, they must decide whether a particular word seems important to understand, whether there are any morphological or textual clues they can use to figure it out, and whether, if they must resort to the dictionary, the given meaning makes sense. Box 8.12 lists the questions students can ask themselves about how or whether to persist in defining an unfamiliar word.

As word detectives, students often decide they are able to move on without arriving at a precise definition of an unfamiliar word. However, if they (or the teacher) determine that a word is a “survival word,” their comprehension of the text is unlikely to survive without developing a sound definition of the word.

The approach to survival words used by academic literacy teachers Christine Cziko and her ninth-grade teaching colleagues included small-group as well as teacher identification of survival words. With a focus on survival words, students came to understand that they could comprehend a passage without understanding every word, that there were some words they simply could not afford to skip, and that in a group or the class not everyone experienced the same words as survival words, so they could help each other out.

Because word knowledge, like comprehension itself, is not an all-or-nothing proposition, Christine and her colleagues developed a graphic organizer to help students recognize that even a minimal amount of familiarity with a word may be enough if there are other clues in the surrounding context (see Box 8.13).

As discussed earlier, the schema students surface may not automatically aid comprehension and the building of new schema. Sometimes misleading or tangential schema leap to the fore. Part of students’ introduction to schema should include anti-examples that highlight the importance of remaining metacognitive about using schema and asking, “Is this making sense?” (See, for example, Classroom Close-Up 8.10.)

When students identify a word as a survival word and feel that they have no idea what it means, a helpful approach to understanding it may well be to see whether they can find meaning clues within the word itself. Knowing how prefixes, suffixes, and root words combine is a powerful tool for vocabulary development.

By having students investigate morphologically related words to identify what such words may have in common, teachers support them to recognize patterns within words and to search for meaning in the patterns they find. Box 8.14 provides examples of investigations students can undertake.4 Not all words lend themselves to this kind of word analysis, but students should understand that when faced with an unfamiliar word, it’s always worth looking for a familiar root or affix and, if possible, building from there.

Another word-learning strategy that should be automatic for students is that of using context. Cloze passages can be used to highlight for students the assist available from context. Teachers Christine Cziko and Lori Hurwitz created cloze passages for their academic literacy students by selecting passages from text the class was reading and omitting important words whose meaning could be gathered from the surrounding context. Their goal was to build students’ comprehension skills generally as well as their vocabulary. Students “solved” the passages by supplying plausible terms for the missing words. By comparing their solutions with the original, students gathered confidence in their ability to use available clues to understand difficult text and the words that contribute to the challenge. Box 8.15 describes another way to use cloze passages, by supplying target vocabulary options.

Vocabulary difficulty often arises when students encounter familiar words used in unfamiliar ways. By being metacognitive, they can recognize these situations and use context to understand the intended meaning of a familiar but now troublesome word. In Classroom Close-Up 8.11, a high school chemistry student employs this kind of contextual redefinition when he realizes there’s more than one way to understand “marine world.”

When students are encouraged to identify “collisions” between their understanding of a word like marine and its appearance in a specific (in this case, scientific) context, this metalinguistic awareness can alert them to new, discipline-specific word meanings. A simple contextual redefinition note taker (Box 8.16) can train students to notice their metalinguistic process when such collisions occur. Matthew, for example, might document his contextual redefinition of marine.

Science text is loaded with common words that have different or very precise meanings in a scientific context. For example, students’ everyday understanding of words like food, carbohydrate, protein, and fat will not be sufficient to understand scientific discourse about digestion.

Although most vocabulary learning is not the product of deliberate word instruction, there are times when teachers choose individual words to teach explicitly. Criteria for making this decision a productive one should include some of the following:5

  • The word is a “high-frequency” or an “academic vocabulary” word and therefore highly useful to students.
  • The word is important to the lesson at hand (a concept related to the theme of the lesson or unit, an important word for understanding the gist of the text, and so on).
  • The word is one that students are unlikely to learn on their own (a new and difficult concept, a word for which the text does not give adequate context or explanation, or the like).
  • The word is likely to be interesting to students.
  • The word serves as a basis for building some kind of generative vocabulary knowledge (illustrates prefix, suffix, spelling patterns, roots, and so on, or serves as an example for word-learning strategies).

In Classroom Close-Up 8.12, grade 9 English teacher Keren Robertson has been very deliberate about choosing to teach the word “justification.” Her first considerations are that the word is highly useful and conceptually significant. To give students experience hearing and using it in authentic contexts, she scaffolds their understanding in two contexts, one with a historical basis and the other in terms of literary character motivation.

Teachers often think of academic language as synonymous with difficult vocabulary, but academic texts are full of complex sentences in which multiple concepts and ideas depend on conjunctions, transition words, and other syntactic features to indicate the relationships between concepts and ideas. Without processing these relationships, students cannot understand academic language. Schema for the role of transition words and other conventions that point to relationships between parts of sentences, sentences, and paragraphs are crucial for navigating academic text. Community college teacher Cindi Davis Harris had this reinforced for her when she overheard the confusion that two of her developmental English students were having because of the word “then”:

Richard, who considered himself a strong reader in my class, and fellow student José were reading from a novel in which there are multiple time and perspective shifts. At one point Richard noticed that he was confused by these sentences, which he read aloud to José:

“ ‘He had no experience as a fighter or a prisoner. . . . Then he went to war and was captured by the Germans.’

Richard objected: “How could he say that he has no experience being a prisoner, then that he gets captured. So he has experience. That doesn’t make sense!”

Noticing the word “then” was essential to recognizing the time shift between the character reflecting on the moment in the present, and what had happened to him in the past. As I pointed it out, Richard somewhat sheepishly admitted, “Oh, I missed that.” We had a short conversation about how those little words matter and I shared how when something doesn’t seem right in a text, I go back and look to see if I missed a transitional word or phrase. For the rest of the course, he would refer to that conversation.

Essentially, Cindi’s advice to her student Richard was to be a “sentence detective.” When sentences don’t fit together, missed or misunderstood text signals, such as transition words, are often to blame. Box 8.17 highlights questions that sentence detectives can ask to help sort out meaning relationships within and among sentences.

Teachers of the first cohort of Reading Apprenticeship students introduced the idea of text signals as signposts through a text, and they had students practice finding them in a variety of different texts. Students realized how much they already knew about text signals and how useful they can be. When students practiced finding and using text signals in sample passages from SAT exams, even the teachers were surprised at the number of text signals in these dense informational passages.

Gina Hale’s seventh graders (who demonstrate in Classroom Close-Up 8.7 how signal words support their comprehension of text structure) created traffic signs that combined signal words and familiar signage. The words “but” and “however,” for example, were represented by a stop sign and the U-turn symbol, meaning readers should stop and go the other way. As Gina notes, “The process of generating these signs for tracking the moves of informational text is at least as helpful for students as the completed and posted signs. It’s the metacognitive conversation about why you need a stop sign and a U-turn symbol that reminds students how powerful their thinking is.”

Other text signals that students often breeze past or misread are referents and their antecedents. Pronouns and other referents (such as relative clauses) are the cause of many reading confusions when students have not learned how to track down antecedents. Rather than deliver formal grammar lessons, many Reading Apprenticeship teachers invite students to nominate confusing sentences or paragraphs for class investigation. Using reciprocal modeling, teachers can then work with students through the detective work that reveals who’s who and what’s what and how a reader can know. (Box 8.18 shows a sample passage nominated for sentence detective practice.)

Students need frequent and multiple kinds of word detective and sentence detective practice that promotes taking a metacognitive and metalinguistic approach to text. Although the strategies students learn to incorporate are inherently valuable, even more valuable are students’ accumulating experiences of themselves as problem solvers. As Michele Lesmeister reports, in her adult GED class, students love the power that their new knowledge of language affords them:

A spark of energy came from the class when students “found” language structures previously studied in a new passage. One student would say, “That appositive phrase is giving us a definition,” and another would chime in, “Bye-bye, dictionary, I got it by myself and from the text.”

References

  1. See Bear, D., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2012). Words their way: Word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction (5th ed.) . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
  2. These criteria were developed by reading researcher and vocabulary expert William Nagy.

From Reading for Understanding, pp 258-272

DMU Timestamp: December 19, 2018 18:14





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