Rationale for Robust Vocabulary Instruction

As we start this book, we ref lect for a moment on the roles vocabulary plays in people's lives. A rich vocabulary supports learning about the world, encountering new ideas, enjoying the beauty of language. A rich vocabulary enhances an interview, allows one to see the humor in wordplay, shores up what an individual wants to say, and, especially, wants to write. It is clear that a large and rich vocabulary is the hallmark of an educated individual. Indeed, a large vocabulary repertoire facilitates becoming an educated person to the extent that vocabulary knowledge is strongly related to reading proficiency in particular and school achievement in general.

There is much evidence — strong correlations, several causal studies, as well as rich theoretical orientations — that shows that vocabulary is tightly related to reading comprehension across the age span: in primary grades (Baker, Simmons, & Kame'enui, 1998), in the intermediate grades (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982), in high school (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997), and with adults (Smith, 1941). According to Perfetti and Adolf (2012), "... for any encounter with a given test, it is the quality of the reader's word knowledge (form as well as meaning) for the words in that text that is crucial to comprehension" (p. 14).

The practical problem is that there are profound differences in vocabulary knowledge among learners from different ability or socioeconomic (SES) groups from toddlers to adults. Consider that: ??By age 3, there is strong evidence of a gap in vocabulary knowledge for children of different SES groups (Hart & Risley, 1995).

When children enter school the gap continues:

• In kindergarten, sizable differences are found between students (of varying SES) in the number of words known (Baker et al., 1998).

• First-grade children from higher SES groups know about twice as many words as children from lower SES groups (Graves, Brunetti, & Slater, 1982; Graves & Slater, 1987).

• First-grade vocabulary predicted students' reading achievement in their junior year in high school (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997).

• High-knowledge third graders had vocabularies about equal to lowest-performing 12th graders (Smith, 1941).

• Once established, differences in vocabulary knowledge remain (Biemiller, 2001; Hart & Risley, 1995; Juel, Biancarosa, Coker, & Deffes, 2003).

Evidence of how strongly students' word trajectories are set early in their school careers is bad news indeed! But a hopeful spin can be put on the bad news by considering the status of vocabulary instruction in the schools. The fact that early differences in vocabulary remain through the school years is understandable if little has been done to change that situation during the school years. So perhaps it is not so much the case that those differences cannot be changed but rather that little has been done to focus on making them change.

A decade ago the available evidence indicated that there was little emphasis on the acquisition of vocabulary in school curricula (Biemiller, 2001; Scott, Jamieson, & Asselin, 1998; Watts, 1995). So, given the evidence, in the first edition of Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002), we summed up vocabulary instruction in the schools as "there isn't much." As to nature of the instruction, at the time of the first edition, our review of the early commercial basal readers in the early 2000s, revealed approaches to vocabulary instruction in the form of traditional dictionary definitions and short exercises, such as a cloze paragraph or matching words with definitions or synonyms. Those of us who taught inservice teachers saw that those were exactly the approaches that teachers initially took when asked to develop vocabulary lessons for class assignments.

Now, a decade later, we need to ask whether those characterizations of classroom vocabulary instruction still hold. Two sources can shed some light on the issue: first, descriptions of vocabulary instruction presented in commercial basal materials published after 2008/2009, and second, studies that describe current classroom vocabulary instruction.

As to the nature of vocabulary instruction in current basals, we have seen a little change in how several of the newer basals provide vocabulary instruction. In some basals, we saw more thoughtful selection of sets of words targeted for instruction. One basal, for sure, and at least one other basal, kind of, provided student-friendly definitions. Occasionally, we saw some follow-up activities that seemed to have a little verve. In one basal we saw a week's words maintained across the week's lessons and brought up in subsequent lessons, neither of which was found in earlier basals. But in other basals we did not find such features, let alone anything that suggested that vocabulary research had undergirded instruction.

Turning to the second source of information about classroom instruction, over the 10 years since Bringing Words to Life was first published, several investigators have dealt with research about what classroom vocabulary instruction is like, and each has concluded that instruction was wanting (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2006; Walsh, 2003). Blachowicz, Fisher, Ogle, and Watts-Taffe's (2006) summary about classroom vocabulary practices documents "less-than-robust classroom practice" (p. 524).

In contrast, it was — and is — our position that the operative principle for vocabulary instruction is that it be robust: vigorous, strong, and powerful in effect. A robust approach to vocabulary involves directly explaining the meanings of words along with thought-provoking, playful, and interactive follow-up. The findings of studies that examined robust instruction has shown it to be effective, not only for learning the meanings of words but also for affecting reading comprehension (Beck et al., 1982; McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Perfetti, 1983; McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Pople, 1985).

When Bringing Words to Life was first published, virtually all the research that was available was directed toward older students, including the studies we had conducted. Nevertheless, even with the absence of empirical research about the effects of robust instruction on young children's knowledge of sophisticated words, it was with some confidence that we passed along the details of robust instruction to teachers in the primary grades.

Where did that confidence come from? We were able to include in the first edition of Bringing Words to Life some...