Selecting vocabulary words to each English language learners.

http://www.colorincolorado.org/educators/content/vocabulary

This article was given to me last semester in one of my education classes. I found it to be very interesting and useful and thought it might be helpful to many of you.
This article states that a student's maximum level of reading comprehension is determined by his of her knowledge of words. The article also states that this word knowledge allows students to comprehend text. As teachers or future teachers, we can explicitly teach word meanings to improve comprehension. Furthermore, it is essential that a student know what a word means and knows it in all the following dimensions:

• The ability to define a word
• The ability to recognize when to use that word
• Knowledge of its multiple meanings
• The ability to decode and spell that word

The article suggests that it is very important to teach key words that children will need to comprehend texts, learn the content in those texts, and pass tests. Words should be taught through direct instruction of word meanings as well as through discussions about words, including prefixes, suffixes, and roots, all of this combined with alot of practice and reading.

Furthermore, the article states that for English language learners, vocabulary development is especially critical for their ability to read and comprehend texts. The article also discusses a selection of vocabulary words that are to be taught to ELLs which are grouped into three tiers. I will briefly discuss each group, and you can further read about it on the website that I have provided.

• Example of Tier 1 Word: Tier 1 words are words that ELLs typically know the concept of in their primary language, but not the label in English. An example given in the article was the word butterfly. This is a word that English language learners may not know, but it can be easily taught by pointing to a picture of a butterfly during text discussion.
• Example of Tier 2 Word: Tier 2 words are more complex then Tier 1 words. They may also be more abstract then concrete. The article suggests words that have connections to other words and concepts, such as, between, among, by, combine, and estimate.
• Example of Tier 3 Word: Tier 3 words are low-frequency words that are found moslty in content books in the upper grades. Some examples include, witticism, isotope, procastinate, or words that are not demonstratable or cognates. These words are rarely encountered in the early grades, but if they do appear, the article suggests that a teacher can translate them or briefly explain them in either English or in the ELLs' first language.