by Katie Kurjakovic
United Federation of Teachers, New York City

Last week, I witnessed a scenario all too familiar to teachers of English language learners. A second-grade teacher was preparing to read a story about George Washington's wife, Martha, to her class. She anticipated all the unfamiliar vocabulary she thought they would encounter. She told them what colonies and colonists were. She spoke of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. Then, shortly after she began reading, a girl raised her hand with a puzzled look on her face. "What's a wife?" she asked.

y colleagues and I find two generally recognized statistics particularly daunting. The first: Readers need to know 90% to 95% of vocabulary in a text in order to understand it. The second: College-bound seniors have working vocabularies of 60,000-100,000 words.1 The problem: ELLs enter our classrooms starting from scratch. Where does one begin? Thanks to the research of Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown and Linda Kucan, we have new knowledge of not only how students acquire vocabulary, but how to more effectively teach it to ELLs.

I have taught ESL for 15 years at PS 11, a K-6 elementary school in Queens. PS 11 has a large population of ELLs. This year, 340 of our 1,175 students were eligible for the New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test. Approximately 80% of the student body speaks a second language at home. While we have had great success in teaching decoding skills using explicit, multi-sensory strategies and programs, teaching vocabulary has remained an obstacle. Even the simplest decodable or predictable text contains words unknown to ELLs. Take, for example, a story titled "The Bet." A colleague asked her third-graders to predict what the story might be about. Members of the class confidently raised their hands. The first student she called on thought it would be about an animal doctor (confusion with vet). The second suggested the book might be about someone sleeping (confusion with bed). They were clearly unfamiliar with the word "bet." Given their initial misunderstanding, what kind of meaning could these students have constructed if they had read the text on their own?

As ESL teachers, we knew our students needed explicit vocabulary instruction. We knew that asking our students to look up words in dictionaries would not work - they could not understand the words used in the definitions. We were also frustrated by the quality of sentences students would hand in as their vocabulary or spelling homework - "Shop: I shop every day. Rush: I rush every day." It was evident that we were not helping students to internalize the meanings of words at all.

We knew we were not alone. In the spring of 2003, the entire issue of the American Federation of Teachers' research journal, American Educator, was devoted to words and the role that weak vocabulary plays in the "fourth-grade comprehension plunge."2 Fortunately for us, that issue included an article by Beck, McKeown and Kucan titled "Taking Delight in Words: Using Oral Language to Build Young Children's Vocabularies." In this article, and in their book from which it was excerpted, Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, the authors provide strategies that have proven effective in our ESL classrooms. Their suggestions for selection and instruction of words, as well as a follow-up activity based on "sentence stems" (see related article) have been particularly useful. What follows is a description of how I have incorporated their strategy for early literacy instruction for ELLs.3

In brief, there are six steps (see sidebar at right).

I use these steps regularly with a group of second-grade beginning and intermediate-level ELLs, as determined by the NYSESLAT. The story I last read to them was the classic Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina. The first step was to choose three to five words. Beck suggests picking words that are unknown, but that will be useful to students in other contexts.5 As I planned the lesson, I anticipated that many students would not know the words long (in reference to time), leaned, upset, peddler and checked (as in fabric design). I decided that the first three words were of broader importance to my second-graders, and that when it came to peddler and checked, I would just provide a quick synonym or explanation as I read the story aloud.

One generally accepted best practice for ELLs is to preview vocabulary. So, in the first lesson, I introduced the words to students with user-friendly definitions. It is important to clarify the meaning of the word as it is used in the text. I defined long as "not quick, taking a lot of time." Lean was "to bend a little so you are not straight" (we all acted this out, of course). Upset does not have its usual meaning, but rather is used in the sense of "to make things fall over." Once we had covered all the words, I was able to read Caps for Sale aloud, without interrupting the flow of the story.

As Beck and her co-researchers stress, it is not enough for students to have passive word knowledge.5 Therefore, steps 4 through 6 help students transfer words from a page of a book into their own experiences and active wells of language. To begin this process, I re-read the book the following day, then discussed one word at a time. First, I used the targeted word in the context of the story. For example, "Let's talk about the word long. In Caps for Sale, we read that the peddler slept for a long time." Next, I demonstrated that long can be used in different contexts. "My train was late yesterday. I had a long wait before it came. While I waited, I read for a long time." Students have now had the opportunity to hear the word "long," with the same meaning, in a completely different context and using different language structures.

The final step was to give students an opportunity to use the target word in terms of their own lives. I provided my students with the scaffold, "I waited for a long time. What is something you have done for a long time?" Their responses allowed them to practice while giving me a window to assess whether they thoroughly understood and could use the word correctly.

If students are to fully internalize new words, however, they need to have repeated interactions with them. In Bringing Words to Life, the authors state, "The vocabulary research strongly points to the need for frequent encounters with new words if they are to become part of an individual's vocabulary repertoire."6 It is my goal to systematically infuse my instruction with newly taught words. I plan to create a vocabulary word wall and challenge myself to use as many words as possible, as many times as possible, throughout the school day and year. It is a challenge I will make to my students, as well.

We reap the rewards of vocabulary instruction daily. It may come after a teacher mentions the long weekend coming up and a buzz goes around the room: "Did you hear that word? Long!" It may be when we ask the students to work slowly and carefully during a test and one asks, "You mean don't rush?" It may be when a bilingual kindergarten student points to an energetic group of his peers and knowingly says to the teacher, "boisterous!" It is stories like these that excite us and challenge us to keep our expectations high.

Robust vocabulary instruction shows great promise in our K-6 ESL classes. It is free; it is fun; it can be adapted to any text or literacy program. The more English words students know, the more they can understand and speak. The more they can understand and speak, the more they will be able to comprehend what they read and develop their writing abilities.

No, we can't teach 100,000 words in a year, but teaching five today is a great start.

Endnotes

1 Hirsch, E.D. (2003) Reading comprehension requires knowledge - of words and the world. American Educator, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 16-29. American Federation of Teachers. p.16.

2 Chall, J.S. & Jacobs, V.A. (1996) The classic study on poor children's fourth grade slump. Reprinted in American Educator, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 14-15. American Federation of Teachers. p.14.

3 Beck, I.L., McKeown, M.G. & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing words to life: robust vocabulary instruction. New York: The Guilford Press.

4 Beck, p. 8.

5 Beck, p. 13.

6 Beck, p. 69.

Sidebar Endnotes

1 Beck, I.L., McKeown, M.G. & Kucan, L. (2002), Bringing words to life: robust vocabulary instruction. New York: The Guilford Press. p. 80.