Teaching Comprehension: Activating Word Meanings

I'm reading: Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A Handbook, bu Jane Oakhill, Kate Cain, and Carsten Elbro. Join the conversation at: https://www.facebook.com/R16Book/ and see the reading guide for the book here.

There are many ways that we know words. Consider this sentence: 

The air was ripe with the pleasant, dewy petrichor of the post-rain afternoon.

You probably don't know the word petrichor, but your GENERAL knowledge about rain, you can think about what the air is like after a rain and have a good idea that it references the smell or feel you get after a rain. Even though, it's technically about the smell, your general knowledge helps you make a pretty good mental model of what the text describes, even though your linguistic repertoire may not include that word. 

And that's the neat thing too, we actually develop new vocabulary as we read. The act of figuring out how the words we don't know fit into the sentence is the trigger for learning the words. (That's one reason comic books are such great vocab enrichers.) 

Furthermore, I think we might be focusing too much in our instruction about "basic (definitional) meanings of words" (p.13) as we teach comprehension. As Oakhill, et. al point out, it is our depth of vocabulary knowledge that triggers associations. It's something I've been thinking about a lot in terms of storage and retrieval of information. A classroom strategy that focuses only on the definitional side of vocabulary would be synonymous with the taxon memory. That's why I always say people who give 20 SAT words per week are not really helping their kids with SAT. It would be better to use approaches that reference the locale memory types described at this link.

Those locale memory strategies will be the type of vocabulary instruction that lead to better mental models for comprehension because of the connotations and associations about how those words are used.