Reflection #8

This week’s readings were on vocabulary instruction.

The Bromley reading, titled ‘Nine things every teacher should know about words and vocabulary instruction’ had information on the nature of vocabulary and useful information for teaching vocabulary. One of my favorite things from this reading was the comparisons between english and other languages, and the information on word stems. Some of the suggested activities involved using a thesaurus to substitute common words. I am a little wary of this approach because using a thesaurus can be risky business anyway and on top of that using it for someone else’s writing seems even riskier! I know I already use some word origin background information when teaching physics vocabulary. Students learn Newton’s 3rd law, ‘for every action there is an exact and opposite reaction..’ The word action meant something different to Isaac Newton than it means in everyday modern language. The current interpretation of action in that context is force. ‘Action’ otherwise is often interpreted as an event, which is often misleading to students.

The Baumann & Graves reading outlined current literature on definitions for academic vocabulary and related terms. This article did a good job on categorizing types of vocabulary and thought these classifications will be a good tool for planning cross-curricular instruction. Math and Science, Physics in particular, will vocabulary terms relevant to both subjects and by being aware of this I can be more knowledgeable about student prior knowledge. By making those cross-curricular connections students will also have a better foundation for new vocabulary terms.