During a discussion in our last class, the mention of using word walls and other methods similar to that came up as a helpful method in teaching spelling and it reminded me of something that I read about in Chapter 7 of Literacy for the 21st Century, which is related to how one might use the word wall, but not the idea of using a word wall in itself, although I think that word walls are an excellent idea.
On pages 237-238, the author discusses a dilemma often faced by teachers, which is choosing which words to teach in class as it would be impossible to teach everything, but we do want to make sure that we are setting our students up with a good base for the future. So, how do we choose which words would be best suited to help set up that strong base?
The author of the text mentions a method set up by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2002) on page 238 that struck me as being very interesting and potentially helpful in answering this puzzling question. They suggest splitting the vocabulary into three categories; those being basic words, academic words, and specialized words. Then they suggest taking mostly from the academic word section as those are the words that will most likely be needed later in a student's educational career.
For the most part, I like the strategy. At least separating the various vocabulary words into categories helps to make sense of the large amount of information in front of us, although I'm not totally sure that I feel comfortable selecting the majority of words from just the "academic words" section. Their reasoning for why those words are important seems solid and I don't think that, at an elementary level of education, for example, that the "specialized words" should get a lot of focus as they are unlikely to show up in the reading material for those children, but I think that a teacher should make sure to get a good feel for the students in his/her class before ruling out teaching the words in the "basic words" section as it's hard to know what kind of background knowledge a student might come into class with. It might well not be an issue, but I don't like to make assumptions as I often find that can lead to problems later.
I could see this strategy being very useful though once the students background knowledge of vocabulary had been assessed because it could help with sorting through the words to figure out which words would be the most helpful for the students to learn at the time.
And on the topic of word walls, since I started this post by mentioning them, I do think that they would be a really useful tool both for vocabulary and spelling purposes. Once a word is learned, it can go up on the wall. And, as was mentioned in another class, it can also be helpful to encourage the students to bring in words that they run across and don't know the meaning to, so that the class can benefit from that knowledge as well and then that word can also be added to the word wall.
This excerpt seems to have some helpful information on the topic at hand and this link seems to have some interesting tips about teaching vocabulary.
Jennifer, I agree with you that word walls are an excellent way for teachers to highlight words and there are multiple reasons for using a word wall. I was a Sub in a Grade 3 Title I class this past week (I believe it means kids from families with less than $14,000 income) and the teacher told me a majority of the kids were below grade in reading. This Gr 3 teacher has two word walls - one word wall for student awareness of grade-level vocabulary words (ie Tier 1+2 Basic and Academic words), plus high-frequency words, and a second word wall which has important vocabulary words related to the literature unit being covered. The Gr. 3 students I met this past week who are below grade really need to acquire a larger vocabulary and do as much reading as possible. Their two word walls are a critical piece to daily learning and their teacher works hard at nurturing their interest in learning and using words from the word wall in a number of interactive ways in lessons throughout each day.
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