Connecting Texts, Comprehension and Vocabulary

The following extract is drawn from PETAA Paper 199, Learning Vocabulary in Context, by Jennifer Miller.

Whether teachers are using graded texts or wonderful storybooks for intensive work, the imperative remains to boost comprehension skills and vocabulary knowledge as an explicit part of teaching. Bowers et al., (2010), who surveyed 108 Year 4–5 English teachers found that most teachers used cognitive strategies and explicit teaching and were good at building background knowledge. However only a quarter paid attention to comprehensible input and opportunities for practice. Choosing accessible material in which students are neither frustrated nor relying too much on others (including the teacher) is clearly important. Formative evaluation of students’ vocabularies and checking the number of unknown words in a text provides one basis for good decisions about which texts to use. And activities for recycling and reusing vocabulary in other contexts, while initially time consuming for teachers, can provide the boost that is needed by many students. Primary classrooms usually offer rich language environments, with word walls, colourful books and charts. Adding word activities and games to the repertoire will help students in all aspects of academic learning, as well as provide fun and engagement. Some activities are shown in the table below, all of which presuppose rich conversations around text.