One of the most most pressing issues facing today's student is the inability to speak in a professional way. There are many children who have been starved of rich vocabulary words and who have learned to speak in grammatically incorrect ways. Whenever I have the opportunity to be in a classroom, I make sure to help students vocabulary. Most of the time, this results in correcting students whose speech and word choice is poor or inappropriate. Research has shown us that students who grow up in an enriching environment have a better vocabulary and are better equipped to perform in school. The questions is, 'how do we, as teachers, create environments that help students enrich their vocabularies?"
It is essential that we teach students to be literate. You can tell a lot about a young man or woman by the way in which they speak. This is something that will follow the students the rest of their lives. One day each student will interview for a scholarship or a job and, chances are, if their diction and literacy are lacking, they will have a hard time getting a good job. Blanhowitz had some really good points that I think should be considered when planning on how classrooms are set up. He said that teachers should: 1) deliver explicit, rich instruction to develop important vocabulary, 2) build strategies for independence, and 3) engage students actively with a wide range of books.
How are we going to incorporate these strategies into our every day activities and lessons?
What are some other ways that teachers can help students develop their vocabulary?
I think that every lesson can incorporate vocabulary whether it is new vocabulary or reviewing vocabulary that has been learned throughout the year. When the teacher comes across a word that they know the class just learned or may not know, they should make it a point to point out the word to the class.
ReplyDeleteI think that it is important that we as teachers model the correct use of grammar when we speak and write. By modeling, students naturally learn the correct way to use new vocabulary in the correct context. We should take any opportunity we have to introduce new vocabulary and give our students repeated exposure so that the vocabulary sticks.
ReplyDeleteI think it is important to teach vocabulary that is useful and relevant in students lives. This means teaching words that they will have the chance to use on a regular basis. The teacher could even make a challenge out of it by introducing new words and then seeing how the students could integrate them into conversations that take place at school. I think students would be more interested in learning and using these words if they thought that they were relevant and useful in their conversations. But challenging them to include them in conversations they would see how useful the words really are.
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