Active Engagement And Social Interactions With Word Meanings

By Author: Alex Armas
Total Articles: 74
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In what they called "rich" instruction, these researchers developed an instructional program in which students worked with words in semantic categories, studied meaningful sentence contexts, and applied words to new and different contexts—all of which exposed students to multiple, varied, and meaningful encounters with words. These efforts required students to think critically and deeply about word meanings and resulted in increased word learning and comprehension.

For the word wall instructional design, we developed a sequence of lessons modeled after the work of Beck and her associates to include students' active engagement with word meanings. The instructional design Replica Tag Heuer provided students with opportunities to actively manipulate and apply word meanings in various language modes, including illustrating, writing, presenting, viewing, and talking. Furthermore, keeping in mind the social inclinations of young adolescents and the well-documented research on the effectiveness of cooperative learning groups (National Institute of ...
... Child Health and Human Development, 2000), we organized the word wall instruction so that students worked in groups.

A final feature of the word wall instructional design is student choice—a powerful construct tied closely with intrinsic motivation (Cordova & Lepper, 1996; Reynolds & Symons, 2001). We included student self-selection of words in this project based upon the success of the well-known Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy (Ruddell & Shearer, 2002), a teaching strategy that directs students to find words for the class to study and learn. Students then engage in teacher-facilitated activities that clarify, extend, and reinforce word meanings. The instructional sequence included building background information about selecting words, introducing words, making connections with words, applying words to real situations, and presenting the words to the class.

The teacher continued to reinforce the idea that targeted words needed to be useful words. The students also brainstormed where to look for interesting and unfamiliar words—books, magazines, the Internet, other sources of print, and television programs. As homework, the students found 3 words each and completed a chart with information about where they found the word, the context in which it was used, and the word's meaning in everyday language. During the next class session, the teacher placed the students in heterogeneous groups of four students each. The students discussed their selected words and decided on the top 5 words every student Rolex Watches should learn. The 5 words from each group were written on the board while a group spokesperson supported the word choices. The students then voted on the top 10 words to study in depth. The teacher selected 2 words from the list to make a total of 12 words for the word study. The teacher divided the words so that each group worked with 2 words. For each of the following steps, the teacher modeled with the words displayed in Table 1 and then facilitated and supported students as they completed all tasks.