Would you read the newspaper if it was all like that? Would you read anything you didn't have to? Most non-readers have difficulty decoding the individual words, but in addition, even if they can decode them, most non-readers do not understand many of the words in formal text.It is reasonable to say, then, that a literate adult knows somewhere around 50,000 words, if you count DRIVE, DRIVER, and DRIVES as separate words. But as I said, literacy and volume of reading is highly correlated with vocabulary size (e.g. Nagy and Anderson, 1984), so an adult that does not read habitually would have a much smaller vocabulary than an adult that reads voluminously. Nagy and Anderson (1984) estimated that an average high school senior knows 45,000 words, but other researchers have estimated that the number is much closer to 17,000 words (D'Anna, Zechmeister, & Hall, 1991) or 5,000 words (Hirsh & Nation, 1992). Surely these dramatically different estimates depend upon the three questions described above, namely, what does it mean to "know" a word, what counts as a "word," and who counts as "average?"What is not at all in doubt, however, is this. People who habitually read from a wide variety of texts have much, much richer vocabularies than people who do not read much. And people who have richer vocabularies find it easier to read challenging texts than people who do not have rich vocabularies. That is the conundrum -- you need a rich vocabulary to read widely, and the best way to develop a rich vocabulary is to read widely. Thus, vocabulary size is both a cause of and a consequence of reading success.So where do you start? Ideally, you start at a young age. Children who are given lifelong support for literacy skills tend to build on their successes and flourish. Children who are still struggling in the second or third grade typically continue to struggle throughout their lives unless dramatic intervention is taken.Ideally, some day, all students will learn to read successfully at a young age, but for now, there are many older struggling readers who do not have very large vocabularies. If you have a student who is not reading well, and who thus does not read habitually, how can you enhance their vocabulary (thus making it easier for them to read habitually)? Is it possible to teach vocabulary directly? Research studies suggest that it is possible to teach vocabulary out of context, but it is not very efficient. It is possible to teach children between 300 and 500 words a year (8 to 10 words a week) through explicit context-free instruction, but that pales when compared to the 3,000 words a year that literate children learn throughout their school years (Nagy & Anderson, 1984). And Stahl & Fairbanks (1986) found that directly teaching children dictionary definitions for words did not enhance their comprehension of a passage of text containing those vocabulary words. The definition of the word only provides a superficial understanding of the word, and the level of word knowledge necessary to enhance comprehension is deeper than mere definitions.Unfortunately, research has shown that the best approach to teaching vocabulary is to teach children some strategies for learning the meaning of words in context, and then encourage them to read voluminously and from a wide variety of texts and genres (Kuhn & Stahl, 1998). Teachers can also help students to develop a deeper understanding of words through some direct instruction that involves talking about the definitional and contextual meanings of words, focusing on synonyms and antonyms, providing examples and non-examples, and discussing the subtle nuances and differences that make synonyms somewhat different (e.g. the difference between kill and murder has to do with intent and crime. You can't murder a pig or a deer, and you can't accidentally murder a person.)
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..