Systemic Vocabulary Development: Research and Implications for School

Leaders, Teachers, and Parents

Edward Joyner, Ed.D.

Iline Tracey, Ed.D
Ivelise Velazquez

Verbal ability, the ability to receive and transmit information through words, is
the most potent intelligence indicator. It is a significant factor in both the transmission
and reception of academic knowledge because teachers deliver subject matter content
through general vocabulary and their courses' specialized vocabulary. Students cannot
master any academic subject unless they can decode and comprehend the range of
words that constitute the specific language within the school's and district's
curriculum. Science, mathematics, literature, social studies, physical education, art,
drama, and music all contain high-frequency words that do not occur in commonly
written and spoken language. Such words act as hurdles to comprehension for students
who do not understand them. A teachers' challenge is to build the academic
vocabulary or background knowledge that allows students to clear these hurdles to
comprehend receptive and expressive course content text.

Schools must establish and maintain practices to ensure that students develop a
broad vocabulary to decipher the written and oral communication used to teach them
the school's curriculum, skills, and content. Moreover, what educators must do should
be based on sound research and common sense, and it should be done consistently
across grade levels and subject areas.

Schools with a high concentration of poor students and students for whom
English is a second language (who also may be poor) have a more difficult challenge.
Children from most middle-class families enter school with an advantage that
maximizes their chances of reading, writing, and speaking well across the content
areas. Children who come from a school and community culture where English is not

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 the first language or where a dialectical variation of English is the dominant language
can handle the oral transactions within their sub-culture and be exceptionally fluent,
yet experience some difficulty in a dominant or standard language environment. Since
much of the intellectual discourse in any modern society is in standard language,
mastery of its words and rules is crucial. The challenge for educators who work in
poor communities is to teach this language in every content area without demeaning
the student or suggesting that her first language is inferior rather than different.

What then must we do to help these students develop the ability to move in and
out of multiple language contexts? How can we help them develop the standard
vocabulary that is the currency of intellectual exchange in various sectors of society
and that is so essential to academic success? Finally, how can we help students decide
how to take what is essential from both languages to develop communication and
establish their voice in the shifting social contexts we encounter in school and day-to-
day living.

We must investigate the research in this area and incorporate insights from the
personal experiences of successful individuals who come from low-income, different
language backgrounds. We also believe that principals and teachers must lead the
language development process in their schools and that relevant central office staff
must provide consistent support. Finally, this effort must also engage parents and
students to create the pervasive press for excellence needed to bring each child to
high-level proficiency in the language arts.

Our own experiences have taught us that human beings tend to develop an emotional
attachment to their first language. This attachment holds whether the first language is
dialectical or one other than English. One comprehends the world through the five
senses and represents this understanding through language. We construct a multimedia
and multisensory dictionary in our head that stores the words, phrases, and images that
we encounter as we grow and develop (Pinker, 1997). We develop certainty about
labeling people, places, and things based on our exposure to the language first brought
to us by primary caregivers.

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 We expand this dictionary as we interact with secondary caregivers and others
we have contact with directly or through the media. Over time, we develop a relatively
independent capacity to expand this dictionary with entries of our choosing. A degree of
comfort and familiarity (with our language) is achieved that allows for the verbal
interaction needed to transmit and receive the information that ensures individual and
group functioning. This comfort level breaks down when we move into a different
language context. All of a sudden, we hear unfamiliar words and phrases. We lose our
voice and our ability to decipher the sounds representing the same things that we
identified with certainty in our first language. We cannot regain these precious gifts
until we have mastered the written and oral language representing the new
communication system that surrounds us.

The act of learning another language in addition to one's original language is

intrusive. If this process conveys that the student's first language is inferior, students
may even resist. Learning dual languages is challenging for younger children.
However, it can be devastating for older ones who have constructed a more elaborated
inner cognitive world that labels and describes everything they know using terms from
their first language. When we introduce another language, we ask them to be bi-
cognitive and make nearly instantaneous translations. They go back and forth from the
first to the second language in the various situations they encounter in the classroom
and other social settings. When we reject children’s first language, we are, in effect,
rejecting them.

Dr. Joyner experienced a fifth-grade classroom in Louisa, Puerto Rico, which

made him acutely aware of this challenge. He was in a science classroom in a
cooperative learning group with a group of fifth-grade boys. The teacher gave him and
the students a black rubber bag filled with items to identify using the tactile sense. He
felt what he believed to be a toy car, water, a pencil, and a round object that he
believed to be a lid from a bottle. While he was right on all accounts, he could not
demonstrate his "genius" because he did not speak Spanish. Dr. Joyner was the lowest
performer in the class and felt humbled when one of his tablemates, Hector, helped
him name the objects correctly in Spanish. Hector's English was much better than Dr.
Joyner's Spanish. Moreover, according to Dr. Joyner, Hector was very sensitive to his

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limited Spanish proficiency and delighted in teaching him. This fifth grader accepted
him unconditionally and taught him with compassion and an excellent desk-side
manner.

Children and adults encounter similar problems when they speak a dialectical
variation of a standard language. If authority figures are not sensitive, they send the
message that labels the language and its speaker as inferior.

Joyner describes his Southern dialect as follows:

"My first language was Black, Southern, North Carolina dialect. I knew the
terms tata, nana, SMO, chirrens, and yawl before I was three. My primary grade
teachers taught me their standard equivalents quickly without ever making me feel
ashamed of the language spoken in my home. I learned the terms potato, banana,
some more, children, and you all in short order. I also learned that I should not
pluralize fish and sheep by adding an "s." I made this shift from dialect to standard
language in a seemingly effortless manner. I owe a debt to Miss McPherson, Miss
Jordan, Miss Ligon, and Mrs. Fraiser for teaching me with tender, loving care. My
principal, Mr. Mebane, set the tone by insisting that we read widely and become
linguistically versatile. He could speak French, German, English, and Black dialect
fluently. My school experiences were filled with rich oral language, books, books, and
"mo"—more books. The research about vocabulary acquisition is consistent with my
experiences."

We know that in the world of high-level (and low level for that matter)
intellectual discourse, a rich and varied vocabulary empowers the learner. Words are
the building blocks of language and the currency of spoken and written
communication. For poor children, exceptional language facility using the standard
form is essential for succeeding in school and life. Social skills, high self-worth,
emotional control, a moral compass, and a solid work ethic are others. This reality
suggests a compelling reason for schools to invest resources in developing strategies
to ensure students receive multiple opportunities to develop a broad vocabulary. In

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addition, there is a body of research that can help schools make sound decisions
regarding vocabulary instruction.

Becker (1977) observed that the primary difficulty with sustaining early
reading gains is the lack of adequate vocabulary that meets the broad academic
demands that begin in the upper-elementary academic grades and continue through
schooling. He also noted that the primary cause of disadvantaged students' academic
failure in grades 3 through 12 was vocabulary size. Stanovich (1986) attributed school
failure to the development of phonological awareness, reading acquisition, and
vocabulary growth. We know that students learn as many as 3,000 words per year or
eight words per day. Some students, however, learn as few as one or two words daily.
Even as methodological improvements in vocabulary research have occurred, one
unequivocal finding has remained: Poor achieving students know alarmingly fewer
words than students with rich vocabularies. For example, Beck and McKeown (1991)
discussed a study conducted by Smith (1941) that reported that high-achieving high
school seniors knew four times as many words as their low-achieving peers. Smith
also reported that high-achieving third graders had vocabularies about equal to low-
achieving twelfth graders.

In 1982, Graves, Brunetti, and Slater (cited in Graves, 1986) reported a study
on differences in the reading vocabularies of middle-class and disadvantaged first
graders. In a domain of 5,044 words, disadvantaged first graders knew approximately
1,800 words, whereas the middle-class students knew approximately 2,700 words.
Using a larger domain of words (19,050), Graves and Slater (cited in Graves, 1986)
reported that disadvantaged first graders knew about 2,900 words and middle-class

first graders approximately 5,800 words.

We can reasonably assume that the vocabulary gap is a significant factor in the
achievement gap. Thus, any school program should aggressively bring poor children
to vocabulary development levels equivalent to their middle-class peers. Benjamin
Mayes, the great Morehouse educator and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., said that
"He who is born behind in the race of life must run faster."

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Qualities of Effective Vocabulary Instruction

Vocabulary instruction must provide adequate definitions and illustrations of

how words are used in natural-sounding contexts (Nagy 1988). Based on research
surveys (Stahl 1986; Graves and Prenn 1986; Carr and Wixson 1986), three strategies
have proven to improve vocabulary growth. They are integration, repetition, and
meaningful use. The following explanation of these three terms is taken from Nagy
(1986).

Integration is the first property of powerful reading and vocabulary instruction. To

execute this strategy, teachers must understand that instructed words should be
integrated with what students already know. This strategy is an outgrowth of schema
theory, which is based on at least two essential principles:

• Knowledge is structured—it is not just a list of independent and unrelated facts

but also sets of relationships between facts.

• We understand new information based on what we already know.

This principle must be applied whenever we are teaching new terms and concepts. For
example, when Joyner taught high school history in the seventies, I used the
description of a vampire to help students understand the concept of colonialism. They
all knew Dracula and Blacula. Moreover, He frequently encounters students who are
in their early sixties who still remember that particular class session. Bela Lugosi and
William Marshall would have been proud.

Repetition in word knowledge is related to the verbal efficiency hypothesis

propagated by Perfitti and Lesgold (1979), which suggests that:

• A reader has only limited processing capacity for tasks that require conscious
attention.

• If a reader can decode well, identifying words in the text proceeds automatically so
that most of the attention can be given to comprehension. Thus reading with
understanding depends on automatic recognition of words in a text.

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Limited word knowledge can have the same effect on comprehension as poor
decoding skills. Therefore, teachers and parents must teach vocabulary using methods
to ensure that readers know what a particular word means and have sufficient practice
to quickly and easily recall its meaning during reading.

Meaningful use is the third principle of vocabulary instruction and requires the
student's active involvement with multiple opportunities to process the information
taught. Instruction should provide an opportunity for students to think about a word
and the meaning or utility that a particular word has for them.

The three of us used a practical rationale when we taught elementary, middle,

high school, and college students when a word or concept appeared to have no
immediate personal meaning and no apparent use for them. We suggested that they
needed to put words in their mental dictionaries as a verbal defense system. We
reminded them of the power of articulate language to discredit any stereotype that
others had about their intellectual ability. For example, Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El
Shabazz) said: " Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those
who prepare for it today." This phrase is extracted from a speech that Malcolm made
(in standard language) to Mississippi youth in the sixties. Most of the great speeches
and writings made by people of color were given in standard language, using King's "I
Have a Dream" speech as one of the most powerful examples. However, these
speeches have a rhythm and a flavor that is uniquely African-American. On the other
hand, Dr. King could not have delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech on the
Washington mall on that eventful day in Ebonics—hence, the need for a bridge from
dialect to the standard language.

Many educators believe that students can learn new words by reading widely.
They will learn these words without assistance through context. This belief is
misleading unless one considers that the student cannot infer the meaning of a new
word in context unless they understand the context. Beimer (1999) has suggested that
the reader must understand at least ninety-five percent of the words in a passage to
infer the meanings of unfamiliar words. So, while we can facilitate vocabulary

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development through extensive reading, it is crucial to match children with books at
an appropriate level of difficulty.
Studies of reading have also found consistently, from the 1920s to the present, that
a well-developed vocabulary is the most critical variable in reading comprehension
(Chall & Stahl, 1985; Thorndike, 1973- 1974). Indeed, word-meaning scores are
positively correlated with reading comprehension scores that a reading vocabulary test
(word meaning) may be substituted for a paragraph-meaning test. Research on
readability has also found, over the past 60 years, that vocabulary difficulty (as
measured either by word familiarity, word frequency, word length in syllables or
letters, the abstractness of words, or difficulty of concepts) has the highest correlation
with comprehension difficulty more than syntax and other structural and organization
factors (Chall, 1958; Dale & Chall, in press; Klare, 1963). (McKeown & Curtis 1987,
p. 11)

We all learn most of our unfamiliar root words in the context of written and
spoken language when we ask for their meanings or look them up in a dictionary.
Thus, students must learn new words intentionally. Their meanings are more likely to
be retained in their mental dictionaries if they are integrated with what they already
know, if used and encountered frequently, and have meaningful use for the individual
student.

Implications for Building Leaders and Teachers

Low achieving schools will not move to higher levels of achievement without
deliberate efforts by principals to support effective instructional practices and establish
language development in the content areas across the curriculum. For example, in
vocabulary development, principals must work with teachers to establish research-
based practices in all classrooms that facilitate word acquisition. They must procure
the resources and set aside the time for teachers to make individual and group
decisions about this worthy goal. Principals must monitor classrooms to ensure that
everyone is working effectively. Furthermore, one of the most significant determinants
of instructional excellence is the quality of student work. When students are doing

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well on challenging work related to high-quality assessments, one can be reasonably
assured that they are receiving adequate instruction. School leaders must also impress
upon students that they are personally responsible for certain aspects of their learning,
and principals should keep parents informed of important academic initiatives.

Principals and teachers should work together to establish classroom standards for
teaching vocabulary in every subject area. Such practices could include:

1. Direct instruction of unfamiliar words in all lessons in all content areas

2. Systematic teaching of essential prefixes and suffixes

3. Direct teaching of grade-level vocabulary lists with strategies to integrate the

words with what students already know

4. Provisions for repeated, meaningful use of the word (s) through writing and
speaking in and out of the classroom

5. The development of classroom games and school-wide contests to facilitate the

love of words, and

6. Provision of staff and students opportunities to invent ways that language

development can become a goal for all students.

There are probably many more ways that schools can get students hooked on
language through systematic word study. This informal paper will hopefully provide
school leaders and teachers with an opportunity to mobilize students, staff, and parents
to pursue this worthy goal.

References

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