VOCABULARY LESSON CRITIQUE

Link to video: https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/middle-school-vocabulary-development

Overview

The lesson is for a 7th Grade mainstream Language Arts class with several ELLs, and is at the end of a unit titled “Persuasion Across Time and Space.” The unit is about the nature of language and how it is used to persuade and convince. The teacher is using the vocabulary activity as partly a review, and partly a way for the students to extend their thinking and use of the words.

At the beginning of the unit, students read both the Gettysburg Address and texts explaining the Civil War and providing historical / social context. They have since done several readings with different activities to learn the vocabulary. The goal, according to the unit designer, is “through multiple interactions, a workable definition of key terms.”

For this activity the students do not have the comfort of the text in front of them. Instead, they will use decontextualized clues to recall key terminology from the text and unit.

Students are placed in groups of four and are each given a role. The first student’s job is to give the first letter of a word. The second student gives the number of syllables. The third gives the last letter. The fourth gives the definition. This information is presented in linear order. The goal is to use the clues to recall the word. The teacher models the activity once, and then the students work together on the rest. The teacher then calls the class together and discusses the answers.

Which of Snow’s principles were used in the lesson?

Rule #2: Ensure recurrent exposures in a variety of contexts. The teacher in the video noted that it felt a bit strange to be going over vocabulary at the end of the unit – with ELL learners she is used to preteaching only at the beginning or in preparation for reading a text. However, getting the students to recall the word at the end provides even more exposure to the key persuasive words used in the Address. By using the words in different semantic contenxts, it also provides challenging but useful scaffolding – students learned the words through the text and thus likely had more context to draw upon. This activity takes away the context and makes the students ponder the word itself – the very definition of CALP language.

Rule #3: Provide opportunities to use the words. The students really have to play around with the actual features of the word, as well as the meaning, in order to identify it. This combination of phonological and semantic aspects draws a really valuable link between the combination of verbal and written English that forms true literacy.

Rule #9: Encourage experimentation and expect mistakes. In the video, we see students thinking aloud and trying out various theories. Students make mistakes about number of syllables and deeper meanings, but it is done in a small group so embarrassment and unwillingness to discuss is minimized.

Was explicit instruction used? If so, do you think it was effective?

This lesson took place at the end of the unit, so it is hard to say how much explicit instruction was used when the students first encountered the word. In this specific video, the teacher modeled the activity once for the class, and asked some good recall and extension questions (“Can anyone remember the sentence that used the

word….?”). When going over the correct answers, there was not a lot of instruction, and in my opinion was a bit too brief and fast-moving. I also wish the teacher used more of a visual component (i.e. writing the clues on the board), even though the students have been exposed to the words multiple times previously.

How successful do you think ELLs would be in retaining and also producing the new vocabulary items a few days later?

Presumably, the goal here would be the students applying these words into their own persuasive writing. Here, the words are quite decontextualized, but they had already seen them in the text, so they got a nice mix of how the word is presented. Additionally, higher order thinking by verbally sharing ideas and discussing the features of the word (what it began with, what it ended with, along with the definition) would likely promote retention. Finally, as previously mentioned, the connection between phonological and semantic is very useful.

How would you incorporate at least one or two other principles into the vocabulary lesson?

Rule #7: Expand each word’s semantic (and morphological) mapping. The students, through repeated exposure, are now supposedly familiar with the words. Now would be a good time to introduce alternate definitions if possible, and also try to change the words into different parts of speeech. Breaking the words into root-prefix-suffix, and putting findings on a class chart would also be useful. (Note: this may have been done already in the earlier stages of the unit).

What is one fun vocabulary teaching activity you would add to this lesson?

The activity is pretty contained, but one way to spice it up would be for groups to create their own clues (much like the group at the end) and challenge each other.