Vocabulary Learning: Words, Words, Words

Blast from the Past: I’m taking Independence Day weekend off but thought this previously released blog entry would be a good reminder of some of the great vocabulary resources that are available online. Teachers, parents and kids can benefit from these—even during the summer months.

Okay, the National Reading Panel found that vocabulary instruction improved reading achievement, especially for older readers. And, research has been showing a clear, substantial empirical link—especially for older kids—between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (both within reading and readability research) for almost a century. The National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth found an even bigger impact of vocabulary teaching with children who were learning English as a second language, and the about-to-be-released National Early Literacy Panel report indicates that vocabulary seems to be a proxy for even more sophisticated oral language skills in reading development. Whew, that’s a lot of research support (especially when one considers that those syntheses, for the most part, were looking at different studies).

For years, I was strictly a contextual reader. I never looked words up in dictionaries, except to do the silly assignments my teachers gave me. Consequently, I read a lot but didn’t understand a sufficient amount. Finally, when I decided to go to graduate school and had to prepare for the entry tests, I started teaching myself word meanings (literally teaching myself the meanings of hundreds of words). Every time I came to an unknown word, I would write it on a card, look up the word in the dictionary so I could record the meaning on the back of the cards, and then I practiced… while driving, while supervising recess at school, etc. As my vocabulary improved, so did my understanding (in other words, I believe the research on this one, in part because of my personal learning experience—though, with this much research, there is no real reason to depend on experience).

 Like most educators, I think teaching students word meanings is a great idea, and I’m finding the Internet to be an incredible resource for teaching activities. I know there are lots of sites out there, but here are three of my very favorite ones. I think these are must haves for teachers, as they include some pretty cool stuff.

One Look

http://www.onelook.com/

This is the online dictionary that I have programmed into all my computers. It is on the favorites list of everyone. And for good reason. One Look includes 109 different dictionaries and word lists. You can look words up in English or in other languages. You can see alternative definitions across dictionaries, there is a reverse dictionary, and it pronounces the words. When you are searching for child-friendly definitions, having so many choices can really help. This is the source that Cyndie and I use to settle our semantic arguments at dinner! This not only has lots of information it is easy to use. (There are some things the Oxford English Dictionary can do better than this one, etymology for example, but OED is proprietary. I can get it through my university, but it isn’t available on the net without cost. One Look will likely be sufficient for most purposes, and it is free.)

Visual Thesaurus

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

Okay, this one isn;t exactly free. You can run some free trials, but then you have to buy a site license (which isn’t very expensive—about $20 per year). If I had an alternative to this wonderful site, I would not be encouraging it. Yes, I know there are perfectly good thesauri available online, but this one is exciting because it provides semantic maps for the words. What a great teaching aid. Take this week's vocabulary words and you can see in an instant what other words they are linked to. This is almost a toy it can be so much fun to play with, and it has lots of information about words, but the real stuff here is the visual thesaurus, that reveals and explains the various links among words.

World Wide Words
http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm

This site is not one that I would turn over to the kids. I like this one because it provides lots of explanations of idioms and peculiar words. My friend, Don Bear, of Words Their Way fame, is always pushing for teachers to show kids an active curiosity about words and language (and spelling), and this is one great site for exploring that kind of stuff. Lots of morphological expeditions here—I always come away knowing more about the language as a result of spending time at this great site.

Hope these help parents and teachers to support their kids’ vocabulary development! I think they will.