Choosing Words to Teach: Beyond Tier Two

1. Choosing Words to Teach:Beyond Tier Two William Nagy Seattle Pacific University wnagy@spu.edu 19th West IRA Regional Conference October 10, 2008

2. I had help • This talk is based on work I have been doing with Elfrieda Hiebert, in preparation for a chapter we are writing for Volume IV of the Handbook of Reading Research. • Any imperfections in the presentation are my fault.

3. Why Choosing Words is Important • Building students’ reading vocabulary is essential for student success • There are too many words to teach • Lack of vocabulary control in texts • Increased diversity of student population • High-quality vocabulary instruction is time-intensive • Publishers don’t have a consistent, principled basis for proposing words for instruction

4. Beck et al.’s 3 Tiers • Tier 1 “The most basic words” • Tier 2 “High frequency words for mature language users” • Tier 3 “Low frequency words”

5. Beck et al.’s Criteria for Tier 2 • High frequency for mature language users • Conceptually within reach of students • Related in useful ways to the topic of the lesson or to other words

6. High frequency for mature language users • “How generally useful is the word? Is it a word that students are likely to meet often in other texts? Will it be of use to students in describing their own experiences?” • “likely to appear frequently in a variety of texts and in the written and oral language of mature language users” • “words that are characteristic of mature language users and appear frequently across a variety of domains”

7. Conceptually within reach of students • “words [that] would allow students to describe with greater specificity people and situations they already have some familiarity with. However, notice that these words are not simple synonyms of the familiar ones, but represent more precise or complex forms of the familiar words.”

8. Related in useful ways to the topic of the lesson or to other words • “What does the word bring to the text or situation?” • “How does the word relate to other words?” • “Does it relate directly to some topic of study in the classroom? Or might it add a dimension to ideas that have been developed?”

9. My critique of Tier 2 criteria • Frequency: More attention needs to be given to objective measures of word frequency • Conceptual difficulty: The criterion must be modified to apply to informational text • Relationship to text and other words: Morphology (word parts) as well as meaning must be taken into account

10. Towards a comprehensive framework for word selection Multiple criteria for choosing words • Frequency • Familiarity • Conceptual difficulty • Relationships among words • Role in the text and the lesson

11. Selecting words must take multiple criteria into account • The relative weight of these criteria depends on the kind of text, the reason for teaching the words, and the prior vocabulary knowledge of the students

12. What you need to know about word frequency • Strengths and weaknesses of word frequency • A steep drop-off in word frequency • Frequency and text coverage • Sources of information about word frequency

13. Strengths and Weaknesses of Objective Measures of Word Frequency Word frequency • is NOT a good measure of familiarity (how likely students are to know the word) • is NOT a good a good measure of difficulty (how hard the word is to learn) • IS a good measure of frequency (how often the word actually occurs in print)

14. A steep drop-off in frequency • If you order words from most to least frequent, absolute frequency drops off very rapidly • Most of the running words in text are from a relatively small set of high frequency words

15. Word frequency as a function of rank

16. Word frequency as a function of rank

17. Word frequency as a function of rank

18. Word frequency as a function of rank

19. The Frequency Drop-Off and Text Coverage Once you get past the core of high frequency words (3-4 thousand word families), the remaining words are low in frequency (and increasingly so). Hence: • Each word occurs only rarely in print • Teaching such words doesn’t substantially increase the proportion of words in text that students know

20. Percentage of text covered by words up to a given rank

21. What U (Frequency per million words of text) means • A word with a frequency U=5 occurs 5 times in a million words of text • An average 5th grade student might encounter it 5 times a year – once every other month

22. What U=5 means for vocabulary instruction and text coverage If you taught 200 words with a frequency U=5 over the course of a year, what would your students gain? • They would know one more word per thousand words of text • They would increase the proportion of running words that they know by one tenth of one percent (e.g., from 97% to 97.1%)

23. The problem with subjective impressions of word frequency Mature language users know words that actually occur very infrequently in text • U = 0.5: centaur, cumulus, deacon, demise, farce, filly, grotto, martyr, mildew, smock, thistle, tier, typhoon • U = 0.1 grail, grog, hag, latrine, lingo, octane, smirk, sprig

24. The problem with subjective impressions of word frequency Beck et al.’s examples of Tier 2 words include words with suspiciously low frequencies: • U > 5: 26 words (merchant, tend) • U 1 to 5: 17 words (sinister, sullen) • U < 1 11 words (detest, valet)

25. Information about Word Frequency: Frequencies for individual words • Carroll, Davies, & Richman (1971). The Word Frequency Book. • Zeno et al. (1995). The Educator’s Word Frequency Guide. • The Corpus of Contemporary American English http://www.americancorpus.org/

26. Information about Word Frequency: Lists of frequent words General Service List http://jbauman.com/aboutgsl.html 2000 high-frequency, high-utility words Academic Word List http://language.massey.ac.nz/staff/awl/ 570 word families not in the General Service List that are frequent across a wide variety of academic domains

27. Applying Objective Frequency Data • Data should inform – not replace – teacher judgment • If a word is not in the high frequency core (that is, not in the General Service List or the Academic Word List), it should not be taught intensively unless there is some compelling reason based on the other criteria for word selection

28. Familiarity • A balancing act: You don’t want to teach words students already know, but further learning of partially-known words can often be helpful.

29. Improving students’ ability to judge their own word knowledge Comprehension monitoring is the foundation of all reading strategies Word-level monitoring is a major component of comprehension monitoring

30. Improving students’ ability to judge their own word knowledge Your students should become proficient at answering questions such as: • Do I know the meaning of this word? • Does the meaning I know for this word fit the context? • Do I know the meaning of this word well enough to keep reading with an adequate level of comprehension?

31. Conceptual Difficulty • Beck’s criterion: “Words for which students understand the general concept but provide precision and specificity for describing the concept” • Problem with this criterion: It excludes the most important words in informational text.

32. Another Tier 2 criterion that doesn’t apply to informational text • “words that are characteristic of mature language users and appear frequently across a variety of domains” • Problem with this criterion: Some extremely important content area terms don’t occur “frequently across a variety of domains”

33. Choosing words to teach from informational text • Role in the lesson and relatedness to other words and concepts trumps frequency • Instruction focuses on learning concepts • Examples and non-examples • Emphasis on relationship among concepts • Graphic organizers • Refutation of misconceptions when needed

34. Relationships to other words • Relationships based on meaning • Beck et al. discuss this • I would emphasize it even more • Relationships based on morphology (word parts)

35. Beck et al. on meaning relationships among words • “How does the word relate to other words, to ideas that students know or have been learning?” • Does the word have to be in the text being read? No: • “Think in terms of words that coordinate with, expand, or play off of words, situations, or characters in the text”

36. Relationships based on meaning • Learning a new word gives you not just knowledge of that word, but more precise knowledge of all the words to which it is related in meaning. • When you select words, you take into account not only the value of the word itself, but the importance of the semantic field to which it belongs.

37. Taking related meanings into account • Shudder – a low frequency word (family frequency U = 5) • But it’s in an interesting domain – movement that convey an emotional state or reaction • shiver, tremble, quiver, quake • flinch, wince, twitch • wiggle, wobble, flutter, throb • scowl, smirk, smile, frown, sneer

38. Taking related meanings into account • Take related meanings into account, but don’t forget the problem of interference: Don’t simultaneously introduce new words that are highly similar in meaning (or form)

39. Taking morphology into account in word selection The words seldom and communicate are equally frequent in the language • seldom has no related forms • communicate is related to communication, communicative, uncommunicative, miscommunication

40. Taking morphology into account in word selection The words pyramid and sphere are equally frequent in the language • pyramid has no related forms • sphere is related to spherical, spheroid, hemisphere, atmosphere, biosphere, ionosphere, stratosphere, troposphere, blogosphere

41. Role in the text and the lesson Role in the text • Importance for understanding the text is not the only criterion – there are other ways besides vocabulary instruction to help students understand a text containing an unfamiliar word

42. Role in the text and the lesson Role in the lesson • Intensity of instruction should be commensurate with your expectations for student learning

43. Selecting words must take multiple criteria into account • The relative weight of these criteria depends on the kind of text, the reason for teaching the words, and the prior vocabulary knowledge of the students

44. Weighting of selection criteria depends on the genre of the text If you’re teaching words from informational text, then • Don’t use criteria developed for narrative text • Be prepared to make the effort necessary to bring students to an understanding of concepts beyond their existing knowledge and experience

45. Weighting of selection criteria depends on the reasons for teaching words Different possible reasons for teaching word: • Increasing the proportion of words in text that students know • Developing knowledge of specific concepts • Developing students’ generative word knowledge, especially knowledge of word parts Note that these are not mutually exclusive

46. Weighting of selection criteria depends on the reasons for teaching words If you’re teaching words toincrease the proportion of words in text that are familiar to students, then • Choose words with moderate to high frequency (that is, words on the General Service List or the Academic Word List) • Teach words thoroughly, so that students can use them

47. Weighting of selection criteria depends on the reasons for teaching words If you’re teaching words to develop knowledge of specific concepts, then • Choose words related to important themes and ideas – words that increase students’ ability to make and articulate clearer distinctions among important sets of concepts • Determine the importance of the word based on the semantic field it belongs to, not just the individual word

48. Weighting of selection criteria depends on the reasons for teaching words If you’re teaching words develop students’ generative word knowledge, then • Choose words that illustrate morphological relationships – words that can be prefixed, suffixed, and compounded to form many new words

49. Weighting of selection criteria depends on the level of the students’ vocabulary The less familiar your students are with academic vocabulary, the more consideration you should give to word frequency as a criterion for word selection – but frequency is never the sole criterion for word selection, and using frequency as a criterion doesn’t mean that instruction can’t be engaging.