Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Am I wrong about vocabulary? Teach me what I don't know. Seriously

Well - I received an email asking if I knew of a vocabulary assessment that a teacher could use to assess the learner's level of vocabulary knowledge and place them effectively for instruction. 

Things to say: 

  1.  Well - I have a lot to say about vocabulary. I might be wrong. Teach me.
  2. In my experience, vocabulary assessments are often connected to programs that provide explicit instruction or practice on words that the publishers have divided into categories and levels that make sense only unto themselves. You have to buy the whole program and a bunch of workshit books each year. And  - none of the research shows that these programs work overall to improve comprehension, word knowledge or expressive language in speaking or writing. So...no.  
  3.  I asked Google Gemini to make me a diagnostic assessment. Here's the conversation: https://g.co/gemini/share/ada01a6b6733  
  4. I asked Google Gemini to list free stuff and paid stuff. Here's the convo: https://g.co/gemini/share/f815c6d546e5 Most of what they suggested is crap. 
  5. Avril Coxhead's list is a good place to start. She did her doctoral dissertation on this. Her approach and outcomes are similar to what Fry did with his lists. 
    1. Here's the convo: https://g.co/gemini/share/f815c6d546e5  
    2. and here is Avrils stuff: https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/academic/awllists/
  6. Some of what learners struggle with isn't exactly vocabulary - it's syntax of questioning that becomes its own kind of vocabulary or way of speaking. Often, this is one of the reasons on-level readers struggle with questions - we just don't ask the questions in that way in our classes. And when we do have syntactically and semantically mature questions and sentences and prompts - teachers paraphrase them without teaching kids how to diffuse the language structures. 
  7. Teaching Greek and Latin roots, affixes and derivational constancy from various languages (French, Italian, German, etc.). is probably the best move. There are sites that break them down by grade level. And there are assessments to measure knowledge and mastery.
  8. As far as I know, there isn't a great free and effective vocabulary assessment that can be easily administered by teachers in a whole class setting that also helps teachers know where to start kids at a particular level of vocabulary knowledge and then causes growth from there.  

Recommendations: 


The penultimate thought: 

Most of the ways learners are taught to acquire vocabulary are not supported by research. Looking stuff up in the dictionary isn't that helpful. Writing definitions isn't helpful. Completing workshits isn't helpful. ACT word lists and powerpoints and quizzes aren't helpful. Seek and finds aren't helpful. If it looks like a Chili's menu for children, skip it. Every research study ever done shows the highest vocabulary impact comes from wide reading: to, by, and with. 

And last - 

Vocabulary development has overlapping areas, like a complex venn diagram. There's more to vocabulary than assessing and teaching it. 
  • Systematic Explicit Vocabulary Instruction: Often left out of today's instructional modes. TEA will be adding key vocabulary lists for each grade level. When I asked TEA about this, they said they were using Children's Writer's Word Book by Alijandra Mogilner and Tayopa Moliner and The Living Word Vocabulary: The Words We Know by Edgar Dale and Joseph O'Rourke to determine if words in passages matched the grade levels. I do not know if they are still using these resources. And - I feel like they weren't supposed to tell me about it. 
  • Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition: Research shows that we acquire more vocabulary incidentally through wide reading (and comic books) than any other method. 
  • Content Vocabulary Acquisition: For ELAR, these are our academic vocabulary terms for skills, characteristics, and genres. For ELAR texts themselves, the vocabulary comes from words central to the message, purpose, theme, or thesis. For SS - These are proper nouns. For Science: the vocabulary represents processes. For math: the vocabulary represents mathematics concepts and processes. FOR ELAR, we have content vocab about reading and writing itself. For content area specific words, these are terms that are used primarily in that content area and not used (or used differently) in another content area. 
  • Emotional Vocabulary/Traits: For ELAR, much of our vocabulary development comes in the form of inferences readers make about character motivations, traits, and feelings; and tone/mood distinctions. These are the words we use to talk about the text and the author's craft and purpose. We don't always see these words in the texts themselves. Sometimes. But not always. How are we teaching and exposing learners to this line of words? Research tells us that many of our behavior problems are because people don't have the words to even name anything beyond the basic: happy- sad-mad-glad. 
  • Academic Vocabulary: I think this is often confused with content vocab. Academic vocabulary is really more about thinking and reasoning. It is also how those terms flow in phrases and clauses. It's not just about single words but how they are used in context of grammar and culture. People will tell you that academic vocab is about the content - but it's really about the ways in which we talk about and process the content to make decisions.  In ELAR, we have process level vocabulary for comprehension and composition that are parsed in multiple ways. 

Resources

Whew - Vocabulary rant over. I'll keep looking. 
SR

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