Closing the Reading Gap by Teaching Content-Specific Vocabulary
At the beginning of the school year, my students engaged in an iReady reading assessment, and from the data, we saw that only 10% of our 7th grade students were reading at grade level. In fact, the data showed that most of my 7th graders – 71% of them – were reading three or more grade levels behind.
Hearing this information, you might think that my students were illiterate. However, that was not the case. They could read. Where they struggled was with academic vocabulary, which affected comprehension. Working in a low-income area with traditionally marginalized students, I can list a number of reasons students may struggle with vocabulary. However, I won’t in this blog post. Instead, I want to share three tips for teaching content-specific vocabulary.
3 Tips for Teaching Content-Specific Vocabulary
1. Incorporate Multimedia
When I introduce new words or concepts in my social studies classroom, I like to do so with either images, gifs, or videos. The type I choose depends on the type of vocabulary I am introducing. More often, nouns like ‘archipelago’ and ‘canal’ can be easily presented as images. Moods and movements like ‘excited’ or ‘disembark’ might be better presented as gifs. And then concepts such as ‘Columbian Exchange’ and the ‘Boston Tea Party’ might need a video.
2. Teach Vocabulary Acquisition Techniques
Teach your students how to use context clues whenever they encounter difficult vocabulary in a text. iReady has great lessons on context clues for students who are reading at 3rd and 4th grade levels. For grade-level texts, I use collaborative strategic reading (CSR) vocabulary acquisition strategies. In CSR they call those strategies fix-up strategies. If you want more information on CSR, I have linked a playlist here.
Click here for the CSR playlist.
3. Use Reference Books
It is not simply okay to have dictionaries, thesauruses, and glossaries in your classroom. You have to teach students how to use them. If you are a content teacher like me, you might believe that your time would be better spent elsewhere, but it does not take away from the content by teaching your students how to use the resources in your classroom. Having these resources in your classroom without actually ensuring that your students can use them are a waste.
Even though this blog post was relatively short, I stand by the effectiveness of those three tips. I did not mention this earlier, but at the end of the school year, we were able to see some growth. Remember at the beginning of the past school year only 10% of my students were reading at grade level. By the end, we moved that number to 18%. There is obviously a lot of work that still needs to be done. But I want to point out that for students three or more grade levels below that number dropped from 71% to 47%, which is massive. This school year, I will continue to use these practices to help close the reading gap in my classroom. If I incorporate any more techniques, I will share them through my blog. So please sign up for my mailing list so that you can get the necessary notifications.
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