The vocabulary section of the Reading Rockets site contains lots of great resources and information about vocabulary instruction. Thanks to good research, it’s now clear that teachers can grow kids’ vocabularies through (1) a careful selection of words to teach, and (2) instructional routines that provide practice with new words in multiple settings.
February 2010’s Reading Teacher contains The Vocabulary-Rich Classroom: Modeling Sophisticated Word Use to Promote Word Consciousness and Vocabulary Growth (Lane and Allen). The authors describe elementary classrooms in which the teachers use several techniques to increase students’ word knowledge through explicit and implicit strategies.
The authors describe how Ms. Barker (a kindergarten teacher) started with familiar words (e.g., the kids knew happy, so the teacher began using cheerful and delighted) and then moved to more classroom-specific terms (e.g., starting with “passing out the paper” to “distributing the paper”). Tables 1, 2, and 3 list sophisticated words related to specific content areas, and words teachers can use when discussing classroom behavior and during classroom routines. From Table 1, walking in line might provide an opportunity to use words like file, halt, linger, or swiftly. Group time might provide an opportunity to use words such as deliberate, express and verbalize.
Clearly, this type of incidental use of interesting words isn’t sufficient for all vocabulary learning. Children also learn words through careful, explicit instruction built over time. And while the sophisticated word lists in the paper worked for that K teacher, other teachers may find that they need to create their own meaningful word lists based on the kids they teach.