To me, rushing an assignment seems to come very naturally. Every night, I (along with everyone else) have hundreds of pages of reading, and I’m expected to internalize the themes and ideas being explored by these texts. Fortunately, I like reading, so I am capable of doing so—but I’m almost always held back by an anxiety (physical and abstract) about having to rush myself through the process. I feel this anxiety every time I crack open even the most seemingly dull or antiquated text; it’s not that I don’t want to read Chaucer, it’s just that I want to be able to take my time and process his words. At the end of the day, I’m unwilling—or unable—to compromise, so I end up staying up late to get my work done, reaffirming for myself that I am a person, not a scanner.
Janet Allen’s chapter on effective vocabulary instruction was refreshing, due to the fact that it undertook the task of re-approaching an area of school that even she herself considered challenging. One of the most irritating things about a policy like NCLB is that it fails to appreciate that learning is a process, not a product: that in order to be able to read, a person has to understand the words. In the section that asks, “How can we use vocabulary instruction to increase content knowledge?” Allen outlines a process for approaching complicated texts through the vocabulary words themselves, understanding that knowledge cannot be imposed onto students, that it has to be built. Particularly for students today, who apparently have difficulty with print literacy, the words themselves are the place to begin. She notes that, after reading an introductory text that uses some of the difficult language and then assigning a fill-in-the-blank activity, students can “bring enough background knowledge to do a Possible Sentences activity” (99). Knowledge isn’t imposed onto the students; it is built, stacked, layered, and also connected to new and different ideas. The Possible Sentences activity takes a small, but well-built, foundation of understanding, and then allows the students to exercise some agency in continuing to create connections between the words and concepts at hand. Only then do they undergo the process of reading the actual textbook.
This chapter in particular directed my attention towards something that I try to keep in mind any time I am helping someone who wants to learn: the only way to do it is to be patient. Each page in each textbook is made of individual words, each of which are paths to knowledge in and of themselves. There’s no good reason to ignore the fact that someone may not understand one, or any, of them.
I too found the chapter on vocabulary instruction really refreshing and intriguing. Reflecting on my experiences as an adolescent reader and as a reader today, I find myself assuming that learning new words comes about as a natural effect of encountering words I don’t already know in a text. For me, seeing a new word in the context of a larger piece often allows me to understand it without having to look it up or think too hard about the word’s structure. Reading Allen’s essay, I realized that I take for granted my understanding of vocab learning strategies. How can I expect students to figure out the meanings of new words they encounter without first making sure they have the skills necessary to do so? This was another nice reminder that sometimes I need to take a step back from the activities I’m planning and make sure my (theoretical) students have the skills they need in order for my lesson to be effective. Skills have to come before content, and literacy has to come before understanding.
Another part of Allen’s essay that caught my attention was her quotation of Stanovich, in which he essentially talks about children who are more proficient readers reading texts outside of their reading level, and how that increases the number of new vocabulary words they learn. I thought this was a nice balance to what we read last week about giving students texts that are at an appropriate reading/comprehension level. On the one hand, books that contain too many words a student doesn’t know makes that book’s content inaccessible, but on the other hand, the presence of new words in a text allows the reader to expand their vocabulary. Returning again to what Allen said about learning strategies, I think that having the skills to decode new vocab words can provide a balance between the impossibility of getting content out of an inaccessible text and the opportunity those texts provide for vocabulary expansion.
Allen’s use of concept circles got me thinking about how learning vocabulary, and really learning anything at all, is all about making connections to what you already know. Moving forward, I want to design my assessments with an eye toward understanding connections between content instead of focusing on stand-alone content.