This lesson in a Grade 5 classroom provides an example of the intellectual engagement that word structure instruction can generate. The video has been edited  in a way to hide children’s faces, but it reveals the active role they take in this kind of word structure instruction.


Below the movie, we have included comments and a number of quotes from two seminal articles in the literature on vocabulary instruction (Graves, 1986; Nagy & Anderson, 1984). I encourage you to consider their findings in light of the instruction Melvyn Ramsden models in this clip.


We have also included some of the matrices that appear during the video that you may want to inspect in more detail after observing the clip. Enjoy!

How does the instruction illustrated in this video link to literacy research?


The WordWorks website is mainly designed as a tool to help teachers and administrators get a window into how the writing system works, and to provide ideas and resources for this type of classroom instruction. Because so much of the instruction illustrated in these pages emphasizes content that is not seen in most typical classrooms, many ask what the research says about this instruction when they first encounter it. Also, teachers who are interested in getting support to bring this instruction into their classrooms are frequently asked by administrators to provide research evidence on this instruction.


Few teachers have much time to investigate the research, so I have attempted to identify authors and publications that might provide useful entry points into the relevant literature. Of course anything we have written in our pages, and everything that is written in the pages of the research I am pointing to needs to be read critically. Our view is that the instruction supported by WordWorks meets and usually surpasses the type of explicit word level instruction the research has been calling for. Our Research page cites examples of current research. The two papers touched on here are both older publications that are still regularly cited in the current discussions on reading, spelling and vocabulary development.


        How can we ensure children gain control of the vocabulary they need to succeed in school?


Nagy and Anderson (1984) conducted a study with the ambitious goal of estimating the size of the printed word vocabulary children are exposed to in school. They estimated that the reading material children are exposed to between grades 3 and 9 uses about 88,000 word families. They defined word families as, “a group of morphologically related words such that if a person knows one member of the family, he or she will probably be able to figure out the meaning of any other member upon encountering it in text” (p. 315). While such an estimate can only be very general, it merely needs to be roughly accurate to indicate that children are faced with an enormous number of words to learn in these years. Graves (1986) pointed out that this figure does not represent what any one child needs to deal with, but the sum total of word families appearing in the books and materials students use. He suggests that average students in grades three through twelve learn about 3,000 new words each year (Graves,1986).


Regardless of the specifics, these authors agree with the basic point that the scale of teachers’ task with regard to vocabulary development is a mammoth one that requires a well conceived educational plan -- one that does not expect to teach the vocabulary children need to know one word at a time.


Consider the quotes from these authors that we have included below as you reflect on the classroom instruction illustrated on this page and others on our website.


From Nagy and Anderson (1984):

“A basic implication of our study is that, because of the sheer volume of vocabulary that students will encounter in reading, any approach to vocabulary instruction must include some methods or activities that will increase children’s ability to learn words on their own [emphasis added]. Any attempt to do this could be based on one or more of three possible emphases: Motivation, inferring word meanings from word parts (morphology), and inferring word meanings from context” (p. 325).


“Teaching words together as a family has a number of advantages. First if the most frequent words were already known, this procedure builds a bridge from familiar to new.... [For example] once the meanings of drama were instructed, the meanings of the derivatives could be covered with little additional effort. What additional time is devoted to the derivatives would also function to reinforce the learning of the base word” (p. 326).


“Another benefit of teaching words in families would be to call the students’ attention to the word-formation processes hat relate the different members of the family, so that they would be more likely to take advantage of such relationships when learning other words on their own” (p. 326).


From Graves (1986):

This review looked at fourteen studies of vocabulary instruction which investigated the effect on reading comprehension. Graves concluded that only three of them, (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Perfetti, 1983; McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Pople, 1985) “provided convincing evidence that teaching vocabulary can increase comprehension of texts containing the words taught” (p. 610). Graves emphasized important features of the effective interventions that link to the instruction illustrated in this website:


“Instruction in which words are grouped in semantic categories and taught in relationship to each other and to related concepts is likely to be particularly fruitful” (p. 62).


“Instruction should probably be multifaceted and require active processing on the part of students [emphasis added].” (p. 62).


Both of these articles point to morphology as an important aspect of English orthography that instruction can capitalize on. Although these articles from the mid 80’s are regularly cited in the literature, it is only relatively recently that morphology has become a major interest in literacy instruction research. (Note: Marcia Henry’s excellent work on emphasizing morphological structure and etymology in classroom instruction came out soon after these articles (See Henry, 1988, 1993). Her 2003 book “Unlocking Literacy” is cited on our Resources and Links page, and more on her work will be added to our site soon.)


It is important to note that neither of the two articles cited here emphasize detailed, explicit instruction in the exact patterns that show how morphemes are organized to build words and carry meaning as is illustrated in the video and in the matrices above. Nagy and Anderson gets closer to this point when they note that by teaching words in families, it helps to call students’ attention to “word formation processes” and that this knowledge would likely help them in the crucial goal of vocabulary instruction of helping students become efficient at “learning words on their own”.


My view is that two of the key goals of vocabulary instruction as cited by Nagy and Anderson - motivating students with word study, and developing skill at inferring meaning from word parts are most efficiently accomplished by instruction that explicitly targets the orderly system of how words are structured. Instead of starting with word families and noting in a less explicit way how words are formed, we can make how words are formed the focus of instruction. To do this, words are naturally taught in their semantic word families as is seen in the Grade 1 and Grade 5 clips, and as the two articles quoted here emphasize. Perhaps the most striking element of the two classroom examples we have included is the engagement and problem-solving that is generated by detailed word structure instruction. The element of motivation for word study that is particularly emphasized by Nagy and Anderson (1984) is clearly fundamental to the instruction we are supporting with WordWorks.  Teaching how the ordered system of how words are structured to represent meaning engages (motivates) children to be active learners of the written word.


It is our view that the achievements illustrated all over this website is the work of students who are likely to apply directly gained word knowledge to help them learn new words on their own. As pointed out by Nagy and Anderson, considering the demands of vocabulary acquisition, instruction in how to become self-directed learners of words is exactly what teachers need to be developing.


References

Nagy, W. and Anderson, R (1984), How many words are there in printed school English?, Reading        

    Research Quarterly, Vol. 19, No.3. (Spring, 1984), pp. 304-330.


Graves, M. F., (1986), Vocabulary Learning and Instruction, Review of Research in Education, Vol.

    13, pp. 304-330.


Henry, M. K. (1988). Beyond phonics: Integrated decoding and spelling instruction based on

    word origin and structure. Annals of Dyslexia, 38, 259-275.


Henry, M.K. (1993). Morphological structure: Latin and Greek roots and affixes as upper

    grade code strategies. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 227-241.


(For more on the suffixing patterns see example activities on our Tools page.)

Copyright Susan and Peter Bowers 2008

Note: Some people have had trouble playing this film on this page. If this film is not playing for you, you can go to our YouTube page to see this same film. It is divided into Part 1 at this link and Part 2 at this link.