Getting word as a student

Asked By: Lewis Price Date: created: Nov 14 2022

Answered By: Connor Carter Date: created: Nov 16 2022

Microsoft Word is highly useful for creating text of large volume.

You can easily create and maintain mailing lists, create personalized documents and create newsletters in Word.

It also helps you send documents to a group of people for feedback.

Word provides customized assistance in many ways..

Asked By: Herbert Walker Date: created: May 14 2022

What is the importance of MS Word in our daily life

Answered By: Andrew Sanders Date: created: May 14 2022

You can use MS Word in daily life and business to create professional-looking documents such as resumes, letters, applications, forms, brochures, templates, business cards, calendars, reports, eBooks, and newsletters in speed with high quality.

Asked By: Samuel Price Date: created: Feb 23 2022

What are the uses and importance of Microsoft Word

Answered By: Wallace Moore Date: created: Feb 23 2022

Microsoft word is used to save documents. The documents can be copied to flash drive which serves as an external memory for your computer. This allows you to use the saved documents conveniently taking with you anywhere.

Asked By: Wallace Ross Date: created: Feb 22 2022

What are the main uses of MS Word

Answered By: Curtis Evans Date: created: Feb 22 2022

Given below are the basic functions of Microsoft Word:Creating text documents.Editing and Formatting the existing documents.Making a text document interactive with different features and tools.Graphical documents, comprising images.Used by Authors and Researchers.Detect grammatical errors in a text document.

Asked By: Dominic Griffin Date: created: Dec 18 2022

Why is Microsoft Word an important tool in education essay

Answered By: Richard Walker Date: created: Dec 21 2022

Microsoft word is an important education application. It is important to process raw facts into meaningful information. Microsoft word can benefits teachers and students to create new innovative methods of learning and teaching.

Asked By: Zachary Green Date: created: Jan 03 2023

How does Microsoft Word help you as a student essay

Answered By: Harry Watson Date: created: Jan 04 2023

As a student, Microsoft Word can help me by formatting and editing documentations that I need for my school works and studies. … Documents that I will need to type, print and edit like research papers, letters, essays, and even invitations and posters. It is the easiest and most common type of word processing software.

Asked By: Robert Richardson Date: created: Aug 14 2022

What are the five uses of Microsoft Word

Answered By: Dominic Johnson Date: created: Aug 14 2022

Five Professional Uses for Microsoft WordUses of MS Word: Resumes.Writing Reports and Publishing PDFs.Memos and Forms.Uses of Microsoft Word: Collaboration.Integration With Other Office Programs.Sep 30, 2018

Asked By: Roger Bryant Date: created: Jun 03 2022

What are 10 features of Microsoft Word

Answered By: John Gonzalez Date: created: Jun 03 2022

10 Supremely Useful Features in Microsoft WordConvert a List to a Table.Convert a Bulleted List to SmartArt.Create a Custom Tab.Quick Selection Methods.Add Placeholder Text.Changing Case.Quick Parts.Touch/ Mouse Mode in Word 2013.More items…

Asked By: Jacob Russell Date: created: Aug 19 2022

What are the advantages and disadvantages of MS Word

Answered By: Hugh Lewis Date: created: Aug 19 2022

Microsoft is an indispensable tool for those looking to create a word document offline. It is the most popular word processor in the world. Although there are disadvantages like lack of speed, complex interface, and outdated features. Microsoft is using new technology to improve the user experience of its software.

Asked By: Wallace Richardson Date: created: Dec 17 2022

How is Word 2016 useful to us

Answered By: James Green Date: created: Dec 20 2022

Designed to make life easier, save you time, and ultimately make you look like the hero, the Word 2016 new features are nearly guaranteed to improve your writing. Also, regarding PowerPoint, you’ll be able to improve your presentations and quickly create dynamic and engaging presentations in PowerPoint.

Asked By: Ethan Evans Date: created: Nov 10 2022

Is Microsoft Word beneficial to you

Answered By: Logan Richardson Date: created: Nov 13 2022

One of the advantages of using Microsoft Word is that it is available practically everywhere. Word comes standard on many PCs. You can typically find it on your work computer, computers at school and your home PC. This makes it easy to save documents on a flash drive, take them with you and work on them somewhere else.

Asked By: George Hill Date: created: Sep 20 2022

What is Microsoft Word student

Answered By: Seth Hill Date: created: Sep 20 2022

Students and educators at eligible institutions can sign up for Office 365 Education for free, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and now Microsoft Teams, plus additional classroom tools. Use your valid school email address to get started today.

1. Word Wall

To help your students get more engaged in vocabulary development, you need to nurture word consciousness. This means raising students’ awareness of, and interest in all sorts of words and their meanings.

A Word Wall can help you achieve this. This is a collection of words that are displayed in large visible letters on a wall, bulletin board, or other display surfaces in a classroom.

                            Source: ELL STRATEGIES & MISCONCEPTIONS

So, set this wall and encourage your students ‘to walk the wall’ and hang their favourite words, new or unknown, on it.

Then, invite their classmates to add sticky notes with pictures or graphics, synonyms, antonyms, or related words. Then, student partners walk along the wall to quiz each other on the words (Graves & Watts-Taffe,2008).

Use the Word Wall one or more times a week. You’ll help your students make connections between new and known words.

Since this is an ongoing activity during the whole year, you can keep observational notes of those students who are posting, responding to their words and those who are not adding words to the wall.

This will help you better understand what your students need to expand their vocabulary.

2. Word Box

Word Box is one of the strategies for teaching vocabulary. This is a weekly strategy that can help students retain and use words more effectively.

Students select words to submit to the word box on Friday. These are words they find interesting or ones they want to understand better. They either use the word in their own sentence or take the same sentence where this word was found.

Then, select five words to teach the following week.

Monday: Introduce the five words in context, explain them, then tack them to the Word Wall.
Tuesday: Ask students to create a non-linguistic representation of the words.
Wednesday: Discuss the meaning of the words allowing think-pair-shares.
Thursday: Ask students to write sentences using those words.
Friday: This is the day to assess students’ learning of the five words using this activity.

Ask one student to answer fill-ins for five words. Give students three cards that can hold up: green cards show they agree with the student’s answer, yellow they are unsure and red ones they disagree.

For assessing, use a checklist with the vocabulary running horizontally across the top margin and the class list running vertically down the side. (Adapted from Grant et al., 2015, p.195)

3. Vocabulary Notebooks

Ask your students to maintain vocabulary notebooks throughout the year where they write the meaning of the new words.

You can introduce a new word each week and work together with students to explore its meaning. Then, ask them to sketch a picture to illustrate the word and present their drawings to the class at the end of the week.

Another way to use vocabulary notebooks :

Students create a chart. The first column indicates the word, where it was found, and the sample sentence in which it appeared.

The other columns depend on your students’ needs.

You can include a column for meaning ( where students define the word or add a synonym), for word parts and related word forms (where they identify the parts and list any other words related to it), a picture, other occurrences (if they have seen or heard this word before, they describe where) and for practice or how they used this word. (Lubliner, 2005)

4. Semantic Mapping

These are maps or webs of words that can help visually display the meaning-based connections between a word or phrase and a set of related words or concepts.

Teach your students how to use semantic mapping. Pick a word you intend to explain, draw a map or web on the board ( or on Zoom whiteboard or any digital tool in case you’re teaching online) and put this word in the centre of the map. Then, ask students to add related words or phrases similar in meaning to the new word. (see the example below)

Source:weebly.com

5. Word Cards

Word cards can help students review frequently learned words and so improve retention.

On one side of the card, students write the target word and its part of speech (whether it’s a verb, noun, adjective, etc.).

On the top half of the other side, they write the word’s definition (in English and/ or a translation). They also write an example and a description of its pronunciation. The bottom half of the card can be used for additional notes once they start using the word.

Ask students to add more information about the word each time they practise or observe it (sentences, collocations, etc.).

Yet, advise them not to add too much information in order to facilitate more reviewing the cards.

Devote regularly class time for students to bring their word cards to class. Involve them in activities such as describing the new words, quizzing one another, categorizing them according to subject or part of speech.

Also, show your students how to store and organize those cards. This is, for instance, by putting them into a box with the categories they select or ordering them in terms of difficulty. (Schmitt & Schmitt, 2005)

6. Word Learning Strategies

Our students often have only partial knowledge of the words they learn in the classroom. This is so since a word can have different meanings which they may not be familiar with.

Therefore, teaching students word learning strategies is important to help them become independent word learners. This is by teaching, modelling and providing a variety of strategies that serve different purposes.

Here are some examples of word-learning strategies.

a) Using word parts

Breaking words into meaningful parts facilitates decoding. So, studying words’ parts can help students guess the meaning of new words from context.

There are three basic ways that word parts are combined in English: prefixing, suffixing, and compounding.

Teach those parts. But, focus on the most occurrent ones.

Providing explanations about their use and meanings with illustration is necessary. Yet, it is still not enough.

You need to provide opportunities for students to experiment with word-building skills.

For instance, you can hand out a list of productive prefixes and have students compile a list of words using them. Then, ask them to compare the function of the prefixes in the various examples.

However, consider your students’ level since word parts are more useful to students with larger vocabularies. For instance, a student who doesn’t know the meaning of the adjective content cannot guess the word discontent.

Remember also that learning word parts is an ongoing process. So, encourage your students to continue experimenting with them. (Zimmerman, 2009a)

b) Asking questions about word

Knowing a word means knowing about its many aspects: its meaning(s), collocations, grammatical function, derivations, and register.

So, you can encourage your students to explore a new word’s meaning(s) by asking them to address detailed questions about those features and answer them.

Students will ask questions like these :
• Are there certain words that often occur before or after the word ? (collocation)
• Are there any grammatical patterns that occur with the word ? (grammar).
• Are there any familiar roots or affixes for this word ? (word parts)
• Is the word used by both men and women? (register/appropriateness)
• Is the word used in both speaking and writing?
(register/appropriateness)
• Could it be used to refer to people? Animals?Things? (meaning)
• Does it have any positive or negative connotations? (meaning) (Zimmerman,2009a)

c) Reflecting

When students learn new words it does not necessarily mean they’ll use them. Students may avoid using words in writing because they are unsure of the spelling. When they speak, they may not be willing to use certain words as they roughly understand them in context.

Encouraging students to self-assess their knowledge of each new word they learn can help them focus on areas needing practices. Here is an example of a self-assessment scale students can use.

Besides these 6 engaging strategies for teaching vocabulary, here are some essential tips to follow while using them :

1) Identify the potential list of words to be taught. Keep the number of words to a minimum (three to five words in one lesson) to ensure there is ample time for in-depth vocabulary instruction, yet enough time for students to practise them.

2) Expose students to multiple contexts in which the new words can be used. This will support them to develop a deeper understanding of these words and how they’re used flexibly.

You can do so by giving students frequent opportunities to hear the meaning of the words, read content where these words are included, and also use them in speaking and writing.

3) Encourage extensive reading because this gives students repeated or multiple exposures to words and is also one of the means by which students see vocabulary in rich contexts.

So, for rich vocabulary development, use a variety of strategies for teaching vocabulary and provide the necessary support and guided practice. Besides, assess vocabulary learning and encourage students to learn more words outside the classroom.

What other Strategies For Teaching Vocabulary would you suggest? I would love to hear from you.

References

Grant, K..B., Golden, S.E., & Wilson, N.S.(2015). Literacy Assessment and Instructional Strategies: Connecting to the Common Core. USA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Graves, M.F., & Watts-Taffe, S.M. (2002). The place of word consciousness in a research-based vocabulary program. In A.E. Farstrup 1 S.J.Samuels (Eds.), what research has to say about reading instruction (3rd ed., pp.140-165). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Graves, M.F., & Watts-Taffe, S.M. (2008). For the love of words: Fostering word consciousness in young readers. The Reading Teacher, 62 (3), 185-193.

Hulstijn, J. & Laufer, B.(2001). Some empirical evidence for the involvement load hypothesis in vocabulary acquisition. Language Learning 51/3:539-58.

Lubliner, SH.(2005). Getting into Words: Vocabulary Instruction That Strengthens Comprehension. Baltimore: Paul H. Brooks Publishing.

Schmitt, D., & Schmitt, N.(2005). Focus on Vocabulary. New York: Longman.

Zimmerman, Cheryl. B.(2009a). Word Knowledge: A vocabulary teacher’s handbook. New York: Oxford University Press.

Zimmerman, Cheryl. B.(2009b).(ed.). Inside Reading: The Academic Word List in Context. Four Levels. New York: Oxford University Press.

Words are at the center of everything students learn in school. If students are not learning new vocabulary words, they are not learning the content. If students are not learning all of the new vocabulary words that they need to learn, they are falling behind. It’s that simple.

We all know that having an excellent vocabulary is extremely important. However, when we look at the studies, the true magnitude of the importance becomes far more apparent. For students, vocabulary is linked to reading comprehension and overall academic success. For adults, vocabulary has been linked to career success, wealth, and even intelligence.

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” ― Yogi Berra

Brilliant minds have expressed Yogi Berra’s sagacity for eons (but I think he said best). And after reading this page, you will have an amazing understanding of where you are going. Furthermore, you will be able to help your students understand their vocabulary goals.

Let’s begin by examining a compact list of vocabulary facts that provides an overall foundation for what follows.

Q&A: A Summary of Vocabulary Facts

1.  How many words do students know when they enter kindergarten? Answer: About 5,000 to 10,000 words.

2.  How many words do students know when they graduate high school? Answer: About 50,000 words.

3.  How many words do students need to learn each year? Answer: About 3,500 words each year or about 10 words every day.

4.  How many different words will students come across in their textbooks in grade K-12? Answer: About 88,500 different words.

5.  How many words are in the English language? Answer: About 400,000 active words, or about 500,000 lexemes. With scientific and technical words included, it’s well over 1 million lexemes.

6.  How many different words did Shakespeare use in his writing? Answer: 31,534 different words.

7.  How many different words did Shakespeare know? How large was his vocabulary? Answer: About 66, 534 words.

8.  How large is an average adult’s vocabulary? Answer: At 20 years old, it’s about 42,000 lexemes. It grows thereafter at about 2 lexemes per day.

So, those are the facts based on a whole host of studies. Let’s now take a closer look at a few of these studies and create some context for these numbers.

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How Many Words Do Students Need to Learn?

In this section, we will move on from just numbers. We will place those numbers in context, and we will also look at some teaching-vocabulary wisdom along the way.

Cal State Northridge Reading Institute for Academic Preparation provides a nice overview of the research. In addition to this, they address the fact that students can’t learn all of the words that they need to learn through direct instruction: “The average 3rd grader knows 10,000 words. The average 8th grader knows 25,000 words. The average high school graduate knows 50,000 words. Do they learn 40,000 words in 9 years via direct instruction? No way!”

No way? The reality is that students learn most of their vocabulary incidentally through reading, writing, speaking, and listening, both in school and out of school. However, vocabulary development is one of the five key components of effective reading instruction. Furthermore, the research supports the fact that teachers must take action in many ways to help students learn all of the words they need to learn.

In Promoting Vocabulary Development: Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction (2000), the Texas Reading Initiative presents slightly lower numbers than other sources: “We know that, on average, students add 2,000-3,000 words a year to their reading vocabularies. This means that they learn from six to eight new words each day—an enormous achievement. Individual differences in vocabulary size also involve large numbers. Some fifth-grade students may know thousands more words than other students in the same classroom.”

Unfortunately, students who enter school with a small vocabulary and students who don’t acquire vocabulary words as needed face an uphill battle, as it lowers reading comprehension, and may lead to a Matthew effect, in which struggling students fall further and further behind.

The next source targets the Common Core State Standards, so it is especially relevant. As the title indicates, our goal is to make sure that our students graduate high school with a 50,000-word vocabulary. In Teaching 50,000 Words: Meeting and Exceeding the Common Core State Standards for Vocabulary (2013), Graves and Sales said, “The Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson & Weiner, 2009) lists more than 400,000 active words, and achieving students learn a substantial number of these words. Based on the work of Nagy and Herman (1987) and a number of other scholars, our best estimate is that typical students enter kindergarten with vocabularies of 5,000–10,000 words and graduate from high school with vocabularies of something like 50,000 words. This means that students are learning approximately 10 words a day.”

One basic fact about acquiring vocabulary is that it takes multiple exposures to make new words stick. We rarely learn a word the first time we encounter it. This means that in order to learn those 50,000 words, students will encounter many more words than that. In How Many Words Are There in Printed School English? (1984), William E. Nagy and Richard C. Anderson said, “Projecting from this sample to the total vocabulary of school English, our best estimate is that there are about 88,500 distinct words.” Students will need a variety of vocabulary skills and strategies to deal with so many unknown words. Clearly, using context clues when reading is essential.

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A Little Perspective: How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know and Use?

To add a little perspective, I decided to find out a bit about Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) vocabulary. After all, one would imagine that Shakespeare had a great vocabulary.

In The Story of English (1986), McCrum and MacNeil say, “Shakespeare had one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, some 30,000 words. Estimates of an educated person’s vocabulary today vary, but it is probably about half this, 15,000.”

Here is a different approach and a different set of numbers. In Estimating the Number of Unsen Species: How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know? (1976), Efron and Thisted say, “Shakespeare wrote 31,534 different words, of which 14,376 appear only once, 4,343 twice, ect.” However, by using statistical inference models, they estimate that “35,000 is a reasonably conservative lower bound estimate for the amount of vocabulary Shakespeare knew but didn’t use.” This means that Shakespeare’s total vocabulary was about 66, 534 words.

Compared to our students’ targeted 50,000-word vocabulary, those numbers seem a little low to me. But on the other hand, we learn the easy and common words first. The words get more complex and less common as we continue to learn words and move through life. What did the last thousand words that Shakespeare learned look like? They were probably very uncommon and advanced words.

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A Little Perspective: How Many Words Do Most People Know?

As mentioned above, in The Story of English (1986), McCrum and MacNeil say, “Estimates of an educated person’s vocabulary today vary, but it is probably about… 15,000.” That certainly doesn’t compute with all of our other estimates on vocabulary, especially our 50,000-word goal for our students.

In How Many Words Do We Know? (2016), Brysbaert, Stevens, Mandera, and Keuleers crunched the numbers using data from a large scale crowdsourcing experiment and came up with this: “Based on an analysis of the literature and a large scale crowdsourcing experiment, we estimate that an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions, derived from 11,100 word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%. Between the ages of 20 and 60, the average person learns 6,000 extra lemmas or about one new lemma every 2 days. The knowledge of the words can be as shallow as knowing that the word exists. In addition, people learn tens of thousands of inflected forms and proper nouns (names), which account for the substantially high numbers of ‘words known’ mentioned in other publications.”

As the above study illustrates, the internet is becoming an interesting force in measuring vocabulary. I recently took a couple of the on-line vocabulary tests to see what they were about and to add additional perspective to all of the statistics I have come across.

Keep in mind that the people taking these internet-based tests do not form a representative sample. Every person who takes a test is a person who is interested enough in vocabulary to want to take a vocabulary test. By the way, TestYourVocab.com states: “Most native English adult speakers who have taken the test fall in the range 20,000–35,000 words.”

http://testyourvocab.com/

https://my.vocabularysize.com/

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A Little Perspective: How Many Words Are There in the English Language?

How many words one needs to know is based on how many words there are to know. In The Story of English (1986), McCrum and MacNeil say, “Of all the world’s languages (which now number some 2700), it [English] is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighbouring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 words and French fewer than 100,000.”

In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995; 2019), David Crystal says, “The two biggest dictionaries suggest around half a million lexemes… The true figure is undoubtedly a great deal higher… It is difficult to see how even a conservative estimate of English vocabulary could go much below a million lexemes. More radical accounts, allowing in all of science nomenclature, could easily double that figure. Only a small fraction of these totals, of course, are learned by any one of us.”

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Methods of Calculation: How Do They Count Words Known or Used?

How do they count words? There are three basic approaches: count words, count lexemes, and count lexeme families. Here is an example using these five words:

Q Q  sell, sold, resell, reselling, unsellable

Count Words: 1) sell, 2) sold, 3) resell, 4) reselling, 5) unsellable

Count Lexemes: 1) sell, sold; 2) resell, reselling; 3) unsellable

Count Lexeme Families: 1) sell, sold, resell, reselling, unsellable

To understand this, you must understand the difference between inflectional morphology and derivational morphology.

Q  Inflectional Morphology: Adding and removing inflectional suffixes: e.g., -ing, -s, -ed, etc.

Q  Derivational Morphology: Adding and removing derivational suffixes: e.g., un-, re-, -able, -ful, etc.

Lemma and Lexeme: A lemma is basically a dictionary headword. When we count lemmas, we count just the dictionary headwords. Buy, bought, and buying have just one lemma. Boy, boys, boy’s, and boys’ also have just one lemma. The collection of extended words created from a root or base lemma through inflectional morphology is called a lexeme. Each related word in the lexeme is called a word-form.

Lexeme Family or Word Family: Lexeme families are also called word families. We include both inflectional morphology and derivational morphology for these families. Take for example, help. How many words in the dictionary contain that root? Here are a few: helpful, helper, helpless, etc. In short, every word and word-form that includes the root morpheme help is in the same lexeme family or word family.

This post took me over 2 weeks to write and I was researching for days and days and days before I even started typing.  That’s because measuring vocabulary is hard!  I can calculate a student’s guided reading level like nobody’s business.  I can tell you, in great detail, about a student’s spelling strengths and math skills.   But when it comes to vocabulary, it’s a bit of a head scratcher.  How do I quantify that huge, amorphous mass into a grade?  Using the quizzes with our weekly Jargon Journals gave me some data about student understanding of individual words, but what if I want to know about a general vocabulary levels?  Is there some sort of benchmark?  Is there an easy way to measure if a student understands more than a word’s definition?

Nope.

That’s because vocabulary is like air.  Take a second to think about air.  You probably haven’t given it much consideration lately.  Even though we’re surrounded by it, we take for granted that it even exists.  Air is extremely difficult to hold, so if I want to understand the nature of air I may begin by collecting a sample in a bottle.  Because air provides little sensory input, based on my sample, I may become convinced that all air is round without realizing that the sample has taken the shape of its container.  In this case I’m studying the bottle not the material inside.

It’s the same with vocabulary.  It undergirds every communication to the point that it becomes invisible.  If we’re looking to measure the richness of a student’s vocabulary, it’s easy to look at one multiple-choice test and assume that we’ve uncovered the sum total of information.  But thinking like that takes us right back to analyzing the bottle.   Acquiring vocabulary is a fluid process.  As one article points out, learning vocabulary is multidimensional, incremental, context dependent, and develops across a lifetime. That’s a lot to consider when designing assessments and, for those reasons, there is no single, perfect measure of vocabulary knowledge.  If we want to measure the contents of our vocabulary bottles, we have to rely on more informal assessments.  In this post I’ll go over some different vocabulary assessments and ways they may work in your classroom.

Why Are You Assessing?

The first step to measuring vocabulary is to identify your purpose in assessing.  What are you hoping to get from this assessment?  Why does the information matter?  You have to decide if you’re looking to measure vocabulary breadth (the amount of words a student understands) or vocabulary depth (the amount of understanding a student has about a word).

How Are You Assessing?

If you decide that your purpose is to measure vocabulary breadth, then a multiple choice test is an efficient way to quickly measure a student’s understanding of word meaning.  If you’re using the Jargon Journals, the end-of-unit quizzes can give you valuable information about which words students are starting to feel comfortable with and which words may need further exposures.

But what if you’re looking for something indicative of vocabulary depth?  In that case, a multiple choice format probably isn’t precise enough.  You’ll need assessments that tap into layers of understanding.

If we want to assess how much students know about a word, we first have to decide what it actually means to know a word.  Often we look at one aspect–definition–and use that as a definitive measure, but recalling meaning is just one part of this vocabulary puzzle.  If you’ve ever had students who could tell what a word means, but completely misuse it, you understand.  In the book Creating Robust Vocabulary: Frequently Asked Questions & Extended Examples the authors use an example of the word devious.  Based on the definition in the dictionary (straying from the right course; not straightforward), you can understand why a student whose experience with this word is limited to the definition may write, “He was devious on his bike.”

Confusion like this happens because knowing a word is not an all-or-nothing situation.  Wouldn’t it be nice if it were!  Instead, word understanding happens on more of a continuum.  On one side we have “I didn’t even know this word existed” on the other side is “I can use this word naturally, automatically, and accurately when speaking and writing.”  We’re at different places with different words and it takes time and experience before any word can be utilized at that deeper level.  In other words:

…Learning a word is not like turning on a light, where one moment we do not know a word (the light is off), and the next moment we suddenly learn the word completely (the light is on). Learning word meanings is more like a dimmer switch on a light; we learn words gradually as the light slowly becomes brighter and brighter over time. Put another way, we learn and acquire words by degrees.                                                                             —Vocabulary Their Way, p.237

So, yes we need to know definitions, but that’s just the starting point for knowing a word. In an article from 2000, Vocabulary Processes, authors William Nagy and Judith Scott synthesized vocabulary research to identify five aspects of word knowledge.  They are:

• Incrementality— Knowing a word is a matter of degrees.  Every time we encounter a word, our knowledge of that word becomes a bit more precise.  Take, for example, a relatively common word like free.  How has your understanding of that word deepened over time?

• Multidimensionality— Knowing a word extends beyond recalling the definition.  In the book, Greek & Latin Roots: Keys to Building Vocabulary (p. 13) the authors give these examples of multidimensionality: Allege and believe share a core meaning of “certainty” or “conviction.”  Yet, they are conceptually distinct…Collocation, or the frequent placing together of words, is also a part of word knowledge.  We can talk about a storm front, but not a storm back.  Similarly, we can have a storm door and a storm window, but not a storm ceiling or a storm floor.

• Polysemy–Knowing a word means understanding its various meanings.  The more common the word, the more meanings it has.  For example, the word draw is a word every preschooler knows, but they would be confused by “draw water from the well” or “draw your chair over to the window” or “draw a conclusion about what happened.”  The meaning of a word relies, ultimately, on the context in which it is used.  Sometimes the context is explicit, but it often must be inferred.

• Interrelatedness–Knowing a word means knowing how it’s linked to other words.  This often involves knowing its attributes and how it is related to other words or concepts.  Think of all the things you know about even a simple concept like dog.  You maybe thought of words like pet or furry.  Or maybe the name of your own pet dog.  And what about mammal, companion, loyal, breed?  A word can only be defined by using other words, so by their very nature words are connected.

• Heterogeneity–Knowing a word at a deep level varies substantially depending on the word. The depth of understanding required to know the word the is vastly different than the understanding required by afterhyperpolarization.

Knowing a word is a complex business indeed!  Since we’re not allowed to go poking around in children’s brains, to really measure a student’s vocabulary depth we have to think about the behaviors that can show us a student knows a word. As Greg Conderman says, “Truly knowing a word encompasses the entire spectrum of language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.”  So looking at a student’s speaking and writing are good places to start.  We can surmise a lot about vocabulary depth when we focus on a student’s expressive vocabulary–that is, the words a student knows well enough to use when communicating.  By counting the number of Tier 2 and 3 words (or as some researchers call them, “rare” words) a student uses, we have a clear picture of the richness a student’s vocabulary.  The most efficient way to do this is to look at a child’s writing.

Collect a writing sample from each student.  Count the number of rare words the writer uses.  Then count the total number of words in the piece.  Obviously, the higher the frequency of rare words, the deeper a student’s expressive vocabulary.  In our Tools for Vocabulary Instruction pack, we have a form to help you organize this data. Because vocabulary growth happens over time, the form provides space for on-going assessment.

This process is tedious, however, especially if your writers compose long stories.  Doing this 2-3 times a year would be enough to give you a picture of that child’s vocabulary development.  For the short term, there are many other assessments to indicate a student’s word knowledge.

One option is to do the Rare Words assessment, but have the students participate in the scoring.  For this to be effective, students have to be familiar with rare words.  If you’ve been doing vocabulary study in your classroom, they will have some understanding of what you mean when you talk about rare words.  With the students, I use the term “WOW!” words.  These are words that are perhaps longer, more challenging.  They may take a common idea–for example, happiness–and express it in a more complex way like merriment.  These are words that if you heard someone use them you would say, “Wow!”  For this activity we won’t make a distinction between Tier 2 and Tier 3 words because words from both groups are indicative of higher levels of comprehension and expression.

To complete this assessment, make sure each student has a recently finished written piece.  Distribute a WOW! Words self-assessment to the students and ask them to look through their writing for examples of WOW! words.  They should list any words they find.  At the bottom is a space for students to compare the number of WOW! words to the story’s total words.  You may consider skipping this step if your students are young and this task is too tedious or frustrating for them.  There is also room for students to reflect on the richness of their vocabulary and determine what they can do better as a writer.

By involving students in this assessment, you lose some accuracy.  They may not recognize a word you would consider rare or, more likely, they will include words you don’t think qualify.  It’s not uncommon to see a word like tent included on a child’s list because camping with his family is important to him.  In this activity, complete accuracy isn’t as important as awakening your learners to the realization that they should be using expansive vocabulary in their writing.  By fostering a classroom culture where words are cherished, you create eagerness among your students to learn and use richer words.

Another way to encourage word awareness is to give students a Vocabulary Self-Rating Chart.  On this task, you provide the words.  The words you choose will depend on your why for assessment.  Are you using this as a pre-test for your next science unit?  Is it a follow-up to see which words have been retained from last November’s Jargon Journals?  Are you giving the students words you’ve never taught them to get a general feel of their vocabulary levels?  When you’ve identified your purpose, write the words on the left column of the page.  There’s a form that includes space for 5 words or one that has space for 10 words.  Each student needs a form.  Students read the words and mark the column that matches their familiarity with each word.  Only one column should be marked per word.  The columns are labeled:

1. I’ve never seen this word.
2. I’ve seen it, but don’t know it.
3. I know something about this word.  I think it means______.
4. I know this word well.  I can use it in a sentence:

To score the assessment, the number of each column determines the points to be awarded.  If you distribute the 5-word assessment and the student correctly fills in a sentence and definition for two words (column 4), correctly writes a definition for one word (column 3), and checks column 2 twice (I’ve seen it, but don’t know it), the total score is 4+4+3+2+2=15.

Even if students don’t know anything about the word, they’re still awarded 1 point.  It’s important to honor where they are right now in their learning.  If students recognize that there is value in admitting that you do not yet know something, they’re more receptive to filling that gap in knowledge.

If a student attempts a definition or sentence, but is incorrect, they receive 2 points for that word.  The student has seen the word at some point, but doesn’t know what it means (even if she thinks she does!).

You’ll notice on this ranking that the highest level of understanding is demonstrated by using the word in a sentence.  That’s because it takes 10-15 exposures to a word in meaningful context before it becomes an available part of our expressive vocabularies.  And if a student struggles in school, it may take up to 40 experiences with a word before it is mastered.   Therefore, be wary of vocabulary tasks that expect students to accurately use a new word in the context of a sentence at the introductory stage of learning.  Think about how comfortable you are with new words.  If you learn that the word procrustean means marked by arbitrary often ruthless disregard of individual differences or special circumstances, are you now comfortable using that word in context in front of someone else?  What about immediately having to use procrustean correctly for a grade?  If you’re assessing to see if students have mastered a word, writing sentences is a good exercise.  If you’re measuring anything less than mastery, asking students to use new vocabulary words in context will yield a lot of poorly written sentences and potentially stifle any excitement among students about expanding their vocabularies.

Another form in our Tools for Vocabulary Instruction pack for student self-assessment is the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale.  It’s similar to the Vocabulary Self-Rating Chart, but provides additional space for students to decide if they think they know a word or absolutely know a word.  The form is assessed by adding the number of each question marked.  If on one word a student marks the third choice and adds a correct definition, he gets 3 points.  If he marks the 5th choice and adds a definition and sentence, he gets 5 points.  If he marks any choice, but has an incorrect word meaning, he gets 2 points.

The words you add to the page will be determined by your purpose in giving the assessment.  If it’s a social studies post-test, you’ll include the words from the unit.  If you’re curious about general vocabulary depth, you may include any Tier 2 words that the class hasn’t studied.

If you’re wanting students to make connections among words, don’t underestimate the power of semantic mapping (or word webbing, as I call it in my classroom).  This is an oldie, but a goodie.  In semantic mapping, the teacher chooses an important vocabulary word with which she wants her students to make connections.  Maybe the word is orbit based on a science study of the moon.  Maybe the word is eagerly because it will be used in a class read-aloud.  Maybe it’s not even an entire word, but a root like tract that the students need to practice.  Whichever key word is chosen, it is added to the center of the map.   A few additional important words may be added by the teacher.  Lines are added to connect important words to the key word. This is all that can be done ahead of time, the rest of the information comes from the students.

In these 2 examples from Reading Rockets you can see different uses of a word map.  In the first one, the purpose is to get students to examine the multiple meanings of the word trunk.

The key word for this map is, of course trunk.  The teacher has added some supporting ideas and connected them with lines to the center of the chart.  The rest of the information will be added by the students.  As part of a class discussion, she’ll have them contribute their background knowledge about the different trunks and she will add it as offshoots from the appropriate circle.

In this second word web, the idea is to introduce students to the word versatile.

She has completed the framework of the web and will look for student ideas to contribute to further information for each word.

By using a chart to visually show students how their background knowledge connects to new learning, you offer a powerful too for helping students retain this fresh information.  As Kellie Buis says in her book Making Words Stick (p. 20):

Semantic mapping can make vocabulary meaningful and memorable in ways that reading text in a linear left-to-right fashion alone cannot.  It can make vocabulary knowledge public.  It can make vocabulary concrete in ways spoken language alone cannot.  The techniques of webbing, clustering, or mapping helps students generate nonlinear associations and ideas about words.  It assists them in being interested in the words.  It allows them to feel connected to the important words, and makes them part of the vocabulary learning process.

Word webbing is something that, given enough teacher supported practice, even 2nd graders can learn to do independently.  I’ve done it as a whole group with my preschoolers, so I’m sure it’s accessible to kindergarten and 1st grade classes as a shared writing activity.  Regardless of the grade, as with any strategy you will want to start this by modeling.  Depending on the skill level of your students, it may be appropriate to have students use their vocabulary journals to make individual copies of what you record on the chart.  You can ask them to draw the map on a page of their notebook or distribute a word web from our Tools for Vocabulary Instruction pack.

As a follow-up, you may want the students to do some extensions with the web.  Having them reexamine the words they’ve generated will help them retain the information and provide you with sense of how well they internalized the vocabulary.  You may ask the students to:

• Pick one of the words and write two synonyms.
• Pick one of the words and write two antonyms.
• Pick one of the words and write your own definition.
• Pick one of the words and tell a personal connection to that word.
• Pick one of the words and draw a picture to illustrate the word.  Explain how your picture matches the word’s meaning.

If you’re interested in knowing how well the words have been mastered, you may ask students to pick one of the words and use it in a sentence.

How you score the activity will depend on what you ask the students to do.  If they have created their own word webs, you can collect those and assess them for depth of understanding.

Another assessment tool is vocabulary sorts.  I’ll let Vocabulary Their Way (p.242) sum it up more eloquently than I can:

Concept sorting is a dynamic way to assess students’ conceptual knowledge as they organize, categorize, and arrange related concepts before, during, or after a lesson or unit of study.  Asking students to explain their thinking, either in discussion or writing, provides valuable assessment information regarding the depth of their vocabulary knowledge and their ability to make connections across words in the sort.

There are different formats and different purposes for a vocabulary sort.  As a conclusion to a social studies unit on community, you may give students a set of word cards and ask them to sort the words into either the Goods category or Services.  Prior to a science unit, you may give students a page and ask students to circle all of the words that relate to your upcoming topic.  This Language Recognition Task can serve as a pretest to see what information students already have or a post test to see what has been retained.

A caution with this sort of assessment is that students may make connections you didn’t anticipate.  For example, if a student knows that glass is made from sand and sand is made of tiny rocks, he may circle window as a rock related word because windows are made of glass.

A Language Recognition Task can be used for vocabulary outside of content areas.  In the CCSS, 2nd graders are supposed to distinguish shades of meaning among closely related verbs and adjectives.  With this assessment, the teacher can see how many words for look or hot or throw a student knows.

For categorizing words or identifying real-world connections, a Language Recognition Chart is a helpful tool.  With this task, the students are presented with a group of words and some set categories.  Depending on your goals with this assessment, the categories may be broad “characteristics of a friendly person” or they may be specific “fruits that are juicy.”

TAKE A DEEP BREATH!

Don’t let all this talk of assessment and expressive and context and depth overwhelm you.  The airy nature of vocabulary makes it difficult to manage, but, just like the air, once you realize it exists you pay more attention to it.  When you raise student awareness of the power of words they become excited about learning more.  Let the assessments help you do that.  You’re not expected to assign them all, in fact none of them may even be useful for your class, but anytime you have students thinking about words they already know and attach them to words they should know, you’re going a long way to increase their powers of expression and comprehension.

Check out our other posts about vocabulary:

Why Vocabulary Matters

Acquiring Vocabulary with an Interactive Vocabulary Notebook

Tools for Vocabulary Instruction

Learn Vocabulary Using Fun Activities

Both from personal and professional experience, learning and being able to use vocabulary is a vital component to having confidence and being successful in communicating in any foreign language. Therefore it is important to teach vocabulary well to help students acquire and use the language, as well as develop that confidence.

I recently travelled to Spain and managed to communicate with hand gestures and the words I remembered from doing my GCSE in one year, in 2003. I didn’t need grammar, because I could communicate with the words I knew and recognised. However, I certainly would have felt more confident if I had had more vocabulary in my brain. Hence, the reason for this post and the focus I feel that the ability to practise vocabulary should have in any language learning environment.

What Is This Post About?

This post on ’10 Fun Ideas To Teach Vocabulary’ will explore effective methods to improve vocabulary acquisition, as well techniques that should be included to successfully teach words. I will also present you with 10 fun ways to help students to learn words, whether this be in English, French, German, Spanish or any other foreign language!

(Condensed) Theory And Research Into Language Acquisition

According to Wyner (2014), ‘to improve your vocabulary, you need to learn vocabulary’. Whilst this concept might sound self-explanatory, there are actually a number of approaches that could be taken to achieve this aim.

Clark states that increasing vocabulary ‘does not begin and end with a work sheet on vocabulary’, whilst, Folse (2004), in contrast, believes that word lists or the use of translation, if used in moderation, are effective ways to learn new vocabulary. This begs the question, should we actually use vocab lists to teach lexical items? Graves (2016) suggests another way to build students’ vocabulary is to ‘immerse students in a rich array of language experiences so that they can learn words through listening, speaking, reading and writing’.

In order to understand written or spoken language, students do not need to know the meaning of every single word they see (as is evident from my aforementioned trip to Spain), especially since a native speaker only tends to use around five thousand words in every day speech (Frost, 2004). Graves (2016) concludes that ‘explicit vocabulary teaching’ should be included in vocabulary instruction; meaning that a maximum of 4-5 ‘useful’ words should be taught at any one time, in order to ‘attack’ vocabulary acquisition. This could include using visuals, semantics or mnemonic strategies.

Stewart (2004) is clear, however, that vocabulary is something that students must own. They need to have the opportunity to appreciate, be encompassed by, and truly see words for the dynamic presence that they hold. Giving students many chances to understand and use words will change the way they look at words, and open their understanding. 

What Do I Do?

In my classroom, I combine all of the strategies suggested above: vocabulary lists, activities around listening, speaking, reading and writing, as well as explicit vocabulary teaching. All of these methods allow my students the ability to develop their understanding of lexical items through repeated exposure and variety. I find that this works very well. In addition, I combine ‘fun’ ways of learning vocabulary, which can break up the monotony of traditional vocabulary teaching methods.

I have found or taken pictures of the fun activities on how to teach vocabulary, which you can adapt for your classroom. They include activities to expand vocabulary, how to teach vocabulary as a starter, ways in which students can recycle previously seen and taught vocabulary, as well as ways to improve their vocabulary through dictionary, pairwork and group work. All of these ways in which to teach vocabulary have been tried and tested by me, too. I have explained how I use the fun ways to teach vocabulary below and have a handy handout out which lists of all of the activities outlined below here:
Ten Fun Ways To Learn, Practise and Teach Vocabulary

Watch the video: Ten Ways To Learn Vocabulary In The Languages Classroom here, or read on to get the full details below!

Ten Fun Ways To Learn Vocabulary In The Language Classroom

1. Emoji Prompts – I have written about emojis in my Vocabulary Builder Post which I highly recommend checking out. If you are teaching a topic for which you can find emojis, use them! Emojis are current and something that students can related to. I created this set of ‘sports’ emojis on the messages app on my iPhone. You could do the same for: food and drink, jobs, modes of transport, technology, numbers, directions and the time, for example. Get students to write down the vocabulary for any words they know first, then add more ideas in pairs and small groups and finally, complete the activity as a group. In order to do something with this vocabulary, ask students to write about the sports they and their friends/family like or dislike.

2. Odd One Out – this one pretty much does what it says on the tin. Choose four words related to the theme you are talking about, 1 of the words has to have an ‘odd one out’ element. This activity works well as a starter to introduce a topic. It can be used to teach new vocabulary, but is also a good method to recycle old vocabulary that will be used in the ‘new’ topic. Quite often, I find that different students will choose a different ‘odd one out’, to what I had originally considered. If this is the case, as long as they can justify their choice, in the target language, they should get the credit. 

3. Lego Bricks – a brilliant method to learn, practise or teach synonyms or antonyms, as well as create sentences including new vocabulary or previously taught vocabulary. Using a dry-wipe marker means you can rub the words off once they have been used with one class, ready for a new set of vocabulary. You could also use this activity with stickers on the bricks. An extension for this could be to create a story using vocabulary from X number of the lego brick blocks. Using lego bricks to teach vocabulary is very interactive and fun! If you’re interested in purchasing some lego bricks, these might be useful to you.

4. Post It Notes – Post it notes are very versatile when it comes to teaching and learning vocabulary. This picture was taken from a lesson revising adjectives and the English was written in one colour and the German in another colour. Students were asked to work in teams to match the adjective sets from around the room. The first team to match all sets in their area, correctly, was the winner. 

5. Pictionary With A Twist – A classic, fun classroom game, which is fantastic for revising vocabulary at the end of a topic. You need to put students in small groups of 3 or 4 students per table and have small pieces of paper cut out ready for them. Give students the instructions that they must each draw a different object, related to your chosen topic, on each piece of paper. I recommend getting students to do 3 or 4 each. Once drawn, each piece of paper must be folded in half and put in the middle of the table, ready for play. When you are ready, instruct students to take one sheet and describe it to the rest of the group in the target language, without saying the actual word. Whoever gets the correct word, gets to keep the sheet until the end of play, i.e. when you stay stop. The winner is the person with the most sheets at the end of the activity. 

6. Word Clouds – One way I use word clouds to teach vocabulary, is by uploading a text in the target language and getting students to select words from the word cloud and make as many sentences as they can in the past, present and future. They get a point for the number of sentences their group believes they used accurately. The winner is the person with the most tally points at the end. This vocabulary activity is brilliant for recycling lexical items, but also for language production. 

7. Lolly Pop Sticks – There are lots of activities that you can do using lolly pop sticks. This is an example I recently found online with antonyms of adjectives. This type of activity could be used to revise previously learned vocabulary, combined with some new elements. It could also be utilised with one word on each lolly pop stick, around different themes and students have to categorise the word on each lolly pop stick based on topic. For example, you could write adjectives, nouns and verbs on the topic of ‘home’, which students must sort. If you’re interested in buying lolly pop sticks, you can find loads of quantities at affordable prices online.

8. Randomised Vocabulary Lists and Highlighters – I am a list maker, so this activity comes very easily to me! I write a number of words on an A4 sheet which I photocopy. Each student must highlight all the words to do with ‘X’ in one colour and all the words to do with ‘Y’ in another colour. This normally includes recyclable lexical items which they have seen before, or which they can probably guess through strategies such as considering cognates. Students could also work in pairs to do the same activity.

9. Spongy Letters – or any letters, really. In this example, there are small sections cut out of a sponge tube. They have an individual letter written on each. This activity can be used as revision, but also to see what vocabulary students already know, related to any given theme or topic. The aim of this activity is to create as many words as possible. The letters used in these words will include 7 letters (that you, or the students have selected at random), as well as 1 extra letter that has also been selected at random, but which must be used in all words. I recommend a minimum of 3 letters per word, I advise that proper nouns are not allowed and that the teacher’s say is final when it comes to choosing a winner! 

10. Vocab Spirals – These are fabulous for a number of ways to teach vocabulary and can be used to break down long chunks of text into comprehensible elements. This could be done with a list of vocabulary around a topic, as well as with a long text which includes previously learned words. You could also add some new lexical elements for the students to look up, with the help of a dictionary, perhaps. I recommend the website: festisite to try this out.

So… that’s ten fun ways to teach vocabulary in the language classroom.

Something Extra!

This is an extra fun way to learn vocabulary, just for you!

Vocab Scrabble – I mentioned vocabulary scrabble in a previous ‘tip of the week’ post and I highly recommend using this as a starter, in the middle or at the end of teaching a topic. You project the alphabetical scrabble pieces to the students and instruct them to make as many words as they can, on a topic of your choice.

Which is your favourite ‘fun’ way to learn vocabulary and teach vocabulary in the classroom? I can’t really pick and I love combining all of them during each term!

Did you find the ways to practise, learn and teach vocabulary useful? If so, subscribe to my newsletter for all my latest teaching and learning content based around language acquisition straight to your inbox!

Need more fantastic ideas to teach vocabulary?

Check out this post > Vocabulary Challenges for The Language Classroom

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References

Clark, S., (1999) How To Improve Your Vocabulary, Westminister USA: Teacher Credited Resources
Frost, R., (2004), Presenting Vocabulary, British Council: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/presenting-vocabulary
Graves, M., (2016) The Vocabulary Book, 2nd Ed., New York: Teachers College Press
Stewart, E., ( 2013), Vocabulary: Implicit vs Explicit, http://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/common-core-classroom/55272
Wyner, G., (2014) Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It, New York: Crown Publishing

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