Today’s Literacy Headlines

Dan Santat and the late Jerry Pinkney draw from life (literally) in their memoirs for young readers. Pinkney’s pure, spontaneous drawing process has previously been hidden for the most part by his finished illustrations’ perfectionism. Not so in this posthumous memoir, Just Jerry: How Drawing Shaped My Life. His publisher made the good decision to illustrate the book (lavishly) with Pinkney’s rough sketches for the project. Dan Santat’s book, A First Time for Everything, is a memoir of a different stripe. For starters, it’s presented in graphic novel form. And instead of attempting the broad scope of a life, Santat focuses on one escapade during his middle school days.

The percentage of third graders on track in reading hasn’t budged since this time last year, new data shows — a reminder of the literacy setbacks experienced by kindergartners when schools shut down in 2020. Even so, the test’s administrators are interpreting the flatline at 54% as good news. Paul Gazzerro, director of data analysis at curriculum provider Amplify, said it’s likely that third graders would have fallen even further behind without efforts like tutoring and additional group instruction.

Mississippi’s model for improving early literacy has been a standout since 2019, based on its nation-leading achievement growth on the fourth grade NAEP reading test. But its use of grade retention—holding students back in third grade and, if districts choose, earlier—as both a student intervention and an accountability tool, has drawn criticism, especially from educators, many of whom feel that retention amounts to “educational malpractice.” But that picture seems to be changing, with studies of literacy-focused retention policies, both in Florida and now in Mississippi. The results are stunning.

Ever since the pandemic shut down schools almost three years ago, I’ve been writing about tutoring as the most promising way to help kids catch up academically. I often get questions about research on tutoring. How effective is tutoring? How many schools are doing it? How is it going so far? In this column, the author recaps the evidence for tutoring and what we know now about pandemic tutoring. For those who want to learn more, there are links to sources throughout and at the end, a list of Hechinger stories on tutoring.

Learning how to write well can make students better readers. Study after study has shown that when children are taught how to write complex sentences and compose different kinds of texts, their ability to read and understand a wider variety of writing improves too. “We need to be thinking about reading and writing reciprocally,” said Dana Robertson, an associate professor of reading and literacy in the School of Education at Virginia Tech. Robertson spoke about the research base behind reading-writing connections during an Education Week forum last week, featuring researchers, teachers, and district leaders, about writing and the “science of reading.”

Teachers can create meaningful outdoor learning experiences even if they don’t have easy access to a wilderness space. Recent research shows that even short-term exposures to the outdoors, sometimes called green breaks, have a positive impact on academic outcomes. A brief stroll in an outdoor environment or a short visit to a community garden can positively impact students’ attentiveness as well as their working memory. This is of particular interest to the teachers of students who live in places such as urban centers, where access to green space might be more limited.

Just like you, I have been following the stream of articles and social media posts where teachers are talking about their struggles. I can even relate to many of those struggles, such as unrealistic expectations, challenging classroom behaviors, and mental health struggles. Despite all that we’re up against, I can say with complete confidence that I love being a teacher and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. To be honest, listening to other teachers often makes me feel a bit guilty about how much I still enjoy teaching after more than 10 years as an early childhood educator in Chicago.

English learners are one of the fastest growing student populations in the country, yet the number of specialized educators for them is lagging behind. The number of certified licensed English learner instructors decreased by about 10.4 percent between the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years, according to the latest federal data available. The national English learner population grew by 2.6 percent in the same time period. “It just is a huge disconnect in terms of what we’re seeing with our student demographics and looking at projections of what’s to come,” said Diane Staehr Fenner, president and founder of SupportEd, a consulting firm focused on English learners’ education.

School counselor Meredith Draughn starts every day by greeting the students who fill her campus hallways, cup of coffee in hand. There are about 350 of them, and she knows all their names. “Kids want to feel known and want to feel loved. And greeting them by name is one way we can do that…Research shows that that helps us build a positive culture and a welcoming culture.” Draughn works at B. Everett Jordan Elementary School in the rural town of Graham, N.C., and she was recently named 2023’s School Counselor of the Year by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). The selection committee praised Draughn’s data-driven approach and passion for her students.

Earlier this month, Administration for Children and Families (ACF) announced the launch of the National Early Care and Education Workforce Center — the ECE Workforce Center, for short — to support research and technical assistance for states, communities, territories and tribal nations. With a $30 million investment over five years, the center aims to improve conditions for the early care and education workforce, making it a more attractive field to enter, remain and advance in. The two main goals of the center are increasing compensation, including wages and benefits, and building a diverse, qualified pipeline of future educators.

Ohio could soon join the rush of states requiring schools to use the “Science of Reading” in all its classrooms by fall 2024 — going even further than many states by banning other literacy approaches that have lost credibility. Currently, state law allows districts to teach reading however they want. Under his proposed bill, Gov. Mike DeWine would force them to pick only phonics-based Science of Reading materials from a list the Ohio Department of Education will create. Dewine has also asked the state legislature to ban use of any “three cueing” materials or lessons — an approach considered the foundation of popular teaching methods known as Whole Language, Balanced Literacy or, particularly in Ohio, Reading Recovery.

Design thinking is a lifelong skill that children may use to tackle complex problems throughout their lives and is a valuable skill to learn early in life. At its core, design thinking has several steps: Identify a problem, design potential solutions, test the solutions, redesign as needed and share the solutions with a wider audience.

Getting students at all grade levels motivated and engaged in their education is paramount as schools work to make up for the unfinished learning that happened over the past few years. It’s a task made more difficult by the damage the pandemic did to students’ social-emotional skills. This special report tackles that question by examining by how mentorship programs can drive student engagement, what it takes to get elementary students excited about learning, how work-based learning experiences help high school students see the relevance of the classes they take in school, and the traits of teachers who are consistently successful in motivating students.

Authors Grace Lin and Kate Messner believe books give readers the ability to experience new worlds and empathize with others. Together they wrote “Once Upon A Book,” a children’s picture book where the main character Alice is swept away on an adventure through the magic of reading. “There is a perfect book for everyone,” said Lin. “You just have to find it.” However, there is an art to matching kids with the right book. For parents and teachers who want children to cultivate a love of reading, Messner and Lin provided tips on how to help kids find wonder through books.

For at least a half-century, there has been a great deal of discussion about how children learn to read. While policymakers, curriculum developers, educational leaders, and those in the media have been using this discussion to drive headlines and policy, reading scientists across the world have been formulating questions and conducting experiments to find answers to specific questions regarding how the human brain learns to read. We are far from knowing all the answers, but the research does provide many important concrete understandings about how our brains acquire the complex process of turning marks on a page into language, as well as what to do when it has difficulty doing so.

ILA was determined to rehome the reading lists—which launched in 1974 with Children’s Choices and later expanded to include Young Adults’ Choices and Teachers’ Choices—with an organization that would honor the spirit of the program and produce lists with the respect and care they deserved. The obvious choice: The Children’s Book Council (CBC). For years, CBC cosponsored the Children’s Choices list, and in 2019 it also began cosponsoring its counterpart for young adults.

Communities In Schools, the national organization that provides wraparound services to students in high-poverty schools, will receive up to $165 million from the Ballmer Group, the largest gift in the organization’s 45-year history. The announcement comes just a little more than a year after MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist and writer, gave a no-strings-attached $133.5 million gift to Communities In Schools’ national office and select state affiliates to expand its in-school support services to low-income students. The latest gift from the Ballmer Group will go toward taking the Communities In Schools’ student-support model to 1,000 more schools, both in new locations and in places where the organization already operates.

As we commemorate the lives and history of Black peoples in the United States this February, SLJ has curated a list of fiction and nonfiction books that can be paired in the classroom to offer a nuanced presentation of major historical events of Black history. In this roundup, we feature books that cover some of the experiences lived by the enslaved in this country, from 1619 (the first slave ship) to 1865 (Juneteenth).

As veteran educators, for years we have encountered students who struggled with decoding and reading comprehension, yet were continually pushed on to the next grade. That led to questions: How did they get this far not knowing how to read? What reading program did they use in elementary school? What interventions are helping them catch up? Are parents aware that their child has reading challenges? Is a learning disability at play?

Shortly after taking office, schools Chancellor David Banks took aim at one of the most popular reading programs in New York City public schools, one that had been long embraced by his predecessors. The curriculum, created by Lucy Calkins at Columbia’s Teachers College, “has not worked,” he declared. “There’s a very different approach that we’re going to be looking to take.” Banks, along with Mayor Eric Adams, has vowed to reshape the way elementary schools teach children to read. Backed by a growing chorus of literacy experts, city officials argue the Teachers College approach hinges too heavily on independent reading without enough explicit instruction on the relationship between sounds and letters, known as phonics, leaving many students floundering.

Beginning in the upper elementary grades, research-backed study skills should be woven into the curriculum, argues psychology professor Daniel Willingham in a new book, “Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy.” By the time children are in grade 12, our expectations are very high regarding independent learning. But the brain doesn’t come with a user’s manual, and independent learning calls for many separate skills. Once they’re expected to read something and commit it to memory because there’s going to be a quiz, for example, we need to be teaching them how to read hard texts and commit things to memory.

A lovely aphorism holds that education isn’t the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. But too often, neither are pails filled nor fires lit. Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire. Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998. One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read.

Like many of us during this gloomy time of the year, Alice is sick of the cold and heavy winter clothing. So the little girl turns to a book that helps her escape to warmer, tropical worlds. That’s the premise of Grace Lin and Kate Messner’s new children’s book, “Once Upon A Book.” It’s a look into the imagination of a little girl who discovers the joy of reading and the meaning of home. Lin says, “… it’s a way to show them that a book is such a wonderful way to explore other places and other lives and to live another life in the book. But it’s a safe place because you can always — when you’re done, you close the book and return home. And that’s just what this book does, too.”

Raquel Martinez thinks a lot about time. The time of the day she schedules parent conferences. The time of year she holds open houses at Isaac Stevens Middle School, where she’s the principal. For her, time is essential to how she shows respect for the community her school serves. Many of her students’ parents are farmworkers—some of them migrant workers—who toil 12- to 14-hour days in apple orchards, and on cherry and potato farms in and around Pasco, Wash. “When I ask a family member to come [to the campus] during the day, they are losing money to buy food to put on the table,” said Martinez, 40, who is in her fifth year as the school’s principal.

Lois Lowry (a two-time Newbery Medalist, for “Number the Stars” and “The Giver”) has written about schoolgirls and church mice, the Holocaust and dream spirits, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the private lives of toddlers. She is most famous for warmhearted comedies and dystopic fiction. Her style is transparent: graceful and direct, not attracting attention to itself but pulling the reader in. Her signature is compassion. Knowing Lowry’s versatility, I shouldn’t have been surprised that in her latest book she succeeds in doing three things at once. “The Windeby Puzzle” is structurally strange and beautifully crafted, zigzagging, as its subtitle announces, between history and story. The story begins in 1952, when a small, remarkably well-preserved body is unearthed from a bog in northern Germany.

Two new specialized dyslexia programs will open at Brooklyn public schools as New York focuses more on children with the learning disability. Many teachers at the schools will be trained in a phonics-based approach based in research on how to help struggling readers; at other schools, reading specialists work with struggling students.

The United States Board of Books for Young People’s (USBBY) mission is to “[build] bridges of international understanding through children’s and young adult books.” The annual Outstanding International Books List recommends approximately 40 titles for readers, preschool through high school. Chosen by a committee of people who love and study children’s and young adult literature, these books represent the outstanding bridges authors, illustrators, and translators from around the world create each year.

A Tennessee teacher learns that her high-spirited, engaging lessons don’t have to vanish with the implementation of a challenging English curriculum. “From district leaders bringing in experts to train us, to our visits watching other teachers model lessons, to the way we have been effectively coached to plan, it has all helped me to appreciate the many ways in which our curriculum can lead to student success.”

Carey Wright recently finished overseeing Mississippi’s public education system during one of its most transformative decades. As state superintendent of education from 2013 to 2022, Wright led the Mississippi Department of Education as schools in the nation’s poorest state caught up to the national average in 4th grade reading and math after long lagging the rest of the country. Between 2013 and 2019, Mississippi posted the second largest gains in the nation in those subjects on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. During Wright’s tenure as one of the longest-serving state superintendents in the nation, she oversaw implementation of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, a controversial measure that required 3rd graders to pass an annual reading exam to be promoted to 4th grade, as well as the first state investment in pre-K.

There’s a dizzying amount of activity going on in some states and school districts, spurred by the push to bring classroom practice in line with the “science of reading.” But not all of that activity translates into better reading instruction. Some teachers are being required to take rigorous courses that ask them to re-examine and abandon deeply held beliefs about how children learn to read. Even if they become convinced that change is needed—that is, they have the why—they may not be equipped to put their new understanding into practice. Other teachers are simply being asked to follow a radically different kind of literacy curriculum. They have the what—the instructional materials. But they may not understand why change is necessary.

Parents of dual language learners (DLLs) are often advised not to speak to their infants and toddlers in more than one language. This advice is rooted in outdated notions that speaking to a child in multiple languages, especially when they are infants and toddlers, will confuse them and cause delays in their speech and language development. This belief could not be further from the truth.

Nearly three years into the pandemic, students and teachers in the U.S. are still trying to close the education gap formed by COVID-induced school shutdowns and remote learning struggles. Robert Balfanz, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, joins Geoff Bennett to discuss the challenges facing students nationwide and efforts to stem the country’s learning loss.

Teachers in every content area can build partnerships with the school librarian to support students’ academic literacy across the curriculum. School librarians have always been a cross-curricula resource. They provide physical and online resources to meet the needs of the teachers and students, but they are also able to teach information literacy skills (including academic reading) through inquiry across all subjects.

With nearly 60% of California children not meeting state reading standards by the third grade, strong parent-teacher partnerships and a statewide shift toward evidence-based reading strategies are crucial in helping students learn how to read, a panel of experts said during an EdSource roundtable. “Learning to read is not like learning to speak. We learn how to speak very easily. It is not the same with reading; we need explicit instruction,” said Megan Bacigalupi, a parent of a student with dyslexia and co-founder of CA Parent Power, a statewide parent advocacy organization focused on literacy.

SLJ spoke with five school librarians about how they came to the profession, the work they do each day, and their connection with students. Here are their stories. Says librarian Dionne Howell-Taylor, “I love being able to create programming and getting to work with all of the students in the school. I want them to feel important and to know that the library is a safe haven. It’s important that we have Black librarians because librarians represent the core of a school. Everyone sees us, and we’re the glue that holds a school together.”

The research on early childhood education can seem as messy as a playground sandbox. Some studies show that preschool produces remarkable academic and social benefits for low-income children, and some don’t. But a more coherent story is taking shape with the latest 15-year milestone of a large, long-term study of 4,000 children who attended Tulsa, Oklahoma’s preschool program. In 1998, Oklahoma became the first state to offer free public prekindergarten for all four-year-olds. In the latest study, published in January 2023, children who went to preschool were far more likely to go to college within a couple years of graduating high school.

Klassen had been influenced by the quietly revolutionary artist before Carle made a single book for children. Calling it a tribute might actually be selling this book — Eric Loves Animals (Just Like You!) — a little short. The most complete collection to date of animals Carle depicted throughout his career, it succeeds on its own, regardless of one’s knowledge of or past affection for his work. The only bits of text in the book are the names of the (alphabetically presented) animals and carefully chosen quotes from the man himself. Children can understand and appreciate these quotes at face value while adults will discern their wisdom. The type is set in Carle’s hand-cut letter font.

While using Black history lessons to fill in the gaps in civics and general curriculum is necessary, so is providing access to stories that do not see the Black experience as one rooted only in oppression and enslavement.

Our special education team includes six teachers and four paraprofessionals, and we serve our students through a combination of models. We offer self-contained and behavioral support classes for students with significant exceptionalities, which some of us teach in designated classrooms that have remained intact. We also provide push-in and pull-out services for our students with mild to moderate learning needs, meaning that we teach them in a general education setting as well as pulling them out into a separate setting, which, this year, has become the hallway.

A quarter of Russellville, Alabama’s students are English learners. The demographic shift in the student body is a reflection of a national picture. A drive around downtown Russellville tells a story 20 years in the making. Around the corner from the historic Roxy Theatre on North Jackson Avenue stands the Pollo-lo-Quillo bakery. The busiest barber shop in town is Napoles, owned by a family originally from Guatemala. Even on Highway 43, the main thoroughfare, Wendy’s, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken share the road with Las Palmas Taqueria & Mexican Grill and El Patron.

Today’s Black librarians follow the path of those who came before them, breaking barriers and changing the profession.

Except that he was there alone, which is somewhat unusual, January 29, 2023, was an ordinary Sunday night at Doug Salati’s shared Brooklyn studio, started by Sophie Blackall and Brian Floca, which he “had the incredibly good fortune to join a few years ago.” Salati said that he was “catching up on some emails and getting a project I’m working on in order before the new week began” when the evening took a turn for the extraordinary. In what he described as “a once-in-a-lifetime moment,” he answered his phone to hear Robert Bittner, chair of this year’s Caldecott committee, inform him he had won the award for Hot Dog (Knopf).

The annual announcement of the American Library Association (ALA) Youth Media Awards is the biggest event of the year in the world of children’s publishing — 20 separate awards for books and media, all chosen by librarians. And who knows children’s literature better than librarians? The Newbery, Caldecott, Printz, Coretta Scott King and other Youth Media Awards are some of the most prestigious awards an author or illustrator can aspire to. The 2023 Youth Media Awards were announced Monday morning, January 30, during the ALA’s LibLearnX conference in New Orleans.

Early Monday afternoon, author Amina Luqman-Dawson felt like she was “floating in a dream.” “I am happy to stay in this state for a while,” said Luqman-Dawson after her debut novel “Freewater” won the 2023 Newbery Medal, and she was also awarded the Coretta Scott King Author Award.

Anyone who’s ever scratched their head over their car manual or struggled to parse a website’s terms of service knows: It’s hard to read about a topic you don’t really understand. It’s a common-sense statement that’s backed by research. Studies have shown that readers use their background knowledge — vocabulary, facts, and conceptual understanding — to comprehend the text they read. Much of this evidence isn’t new. But it’s received more attention now, amid the “science of reading” movement.

To improve literacy rates in the U.S., reading expert Timothy Shanahan says we need to stop looking for silver bullets and instead invest in teaching a much broader range of skills. He says we need to be doing the harder work of building reading programs focused on skills such as teaching students how to make sense of difficult texts, how to read effectively in the various disciplines they study in middle and high school, and how to use generative writing to deepen the knowledge they encounter in texts.

Morrisett co-founded the Sesame Workshop, originally the Children’s Television Workshop, with Ganz Cooney in 1968. He served as a board member until his death. The impetus for Sesame Street, which first aired in 1969, was both the civil rights movement and the fact that children from disadvantaged backgrounds were entering school months behind grade level, Morrisett said in a 2019 interview with member station WBUR. “Without Lloyd Morrisett, there would be no Sesame Street,” co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney wrote in Sesame Workshop’s announcement. “It was he who first came up with the notion of using television to teach preschoolers basic skills, such as letters and numbers. He was a trusted partner and loyal friend to me for over fifty years, and he will be sorely missed.”

Here are four main research takeaways for school districts as they assess the strength of their own writing program: reading and writing are intimately connected; writing matters even at the earliest grades, when students are learning to read; like reading, writing must be taught explicitly; and writing can help students learn content—and make sense of it.

New Jersey has become the first state to require information literacy curriculum standards for K–12 students—and the state’s school librarians played a major role in making that happen. The push to include information literacy in curricular standards in the state began years ago with a task force consisting of members of school, public, and academic library organizations.

If books can transport young readers to different places, transportation books show them the way. In today’s children’s picture book market, there are some exciting and unexpected rides for young vehicle-loving readers to check out—stories about family, how roads work, or how kids around the world get from one location to another.

Nonfiction is too often underrepresented in English/language arts classrooms, even though it’s “never been more vibrant or vital” for young people. That’s according to a new position statement by the National Council of Teachers of English that includes a list of recommendations to expand the use of nonfiction literature (which can include which can encompass memoirs, essays, informational texts, literary or narrative journalism, and more) in ELA instruction. The statement proposes a “paradigm shift” for reading and writing instruction, which often prioritizes fiction. .

3 years after a challenging shift to high-quality curriculum, students are more confident — and competent — than ever before. Jennifer Whalen, assistant principal for Battle Academy for Teaching and Learning in Hamilton County Schools says, “I believe our curriculum has helped to create that joy. Organized into four topical modules for each grade level, students and teachers have a full quarter to dive deeply into each topic, steadily building vocabulary, background knowledge and experiences that promote strong reading comprehension and literacy skills. Our students have found a real sense of pride in becoming experts as they move through the modules.”

Award-winning Cuban-American author Meg Medina has today been announced as the Library of Congress’ National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Growing up in Queens, New York, Medina credits her Cuban mother, aunts, and grandmother with her early exposure to storytelling. She reflects how her childhood home did not have a lot of books, but her family would share stories via spoken word, “They just filled my mind with stories that had the double benefit of just helping them remember their stories and their lives and helping me understand my culture.”

“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” refuses explicit conclusions. That’s the source of its appeal. “It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day,” Alexander says, on the book’s penultimate page. “My mom says some days are like that.” His mother acknowledges his experience without endorsing (or rejecting) any specific interpretation. Maybe she’s decided to give Alexander some space to figure things out on his own.

In one sense, the national conversation about what it will take to make sure all children become strong readers has been wildly successful. In the middle of all that, though, the focus on the “science of reading” has elided its twin component in literacy instruction: writing. Writing is intrinsically important for all students to learn—after all, it is the primary way beyond speech that humans communicate. But more than that, research suggests that teaching students to write in an integrated fashion with reading is not only efficient, it’s effective.

Daniel Willingham is a University of Virginia psychologist who frequently engages in pop culture battles armed with academic research. He has made it a personal crusade to persuade teachers that the idea of learning styles is a myth. For years, he has complained that teachers aren’t heeding research about reading instruction, and that many educators are misguided when it comes to teaching critical thinking. Now, Willingham has shifted his focus from teachers to students. In his new book, “Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make it Easy,” he points out all the wrong ways that students do homework, take notes in class or study for tests.

Traditionally, accessibility features have been perceived as tools that only benefit specific learners. For example, if you have a student with dyslexia, you might help that student learn how to use the text-to-speech and speech-to-text features of their device when reading and writing. However, accessibility features (while essential for some learners) can also be beneficial to other learners. If we view accessibility features through the lens of Universal Design for Learning, then we realize that accessibility features are one way to promote access and minimize barriers for the wide variety of learners in our classrooms.

Here’s a story you might know — it’s a classic fairy tale — “Once upon a time, there was a little old woman and a little old man who lived together in a little old house. They were lonely, so the little old lady decided to make a man out of stinky cheese.” It’s Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s take on The Gingerbread Man, with one very important plot twist — the stinky cheese man is so stinky that no one wants to run, run, run after him, much less eat him. It’s the title story of their 1992 children’s book, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales

A more intentional focus on writing instruction is reaping big rewards for a Tennessee district. In Sumner County, a district serving about 29,000 students, school leaders in 2019 were looking for a new, more effective way to bolster students’ comprehension skills, starting in the early elementary grades. Sumner County began implementing a new English/language arts curriculum that incorporates writing as a main focus of students’ lessons, pushing them beyond memoirs and personal essays to build this background knowledge. While the bulk of the writing instruction happens in students’ ELA classes, other courses, like science and social studies, now also incorporate more writing projects linked to their lessons.

Subject-specific vocabulary goes hand-in-hand with a deep and meaningful knowledge of content. It allows us to engage with that subject, unlocks understanding, and promotes clear and precise communication. At the end of a topic or unit of work, I like to encourage my students to play with the words they’ve learned. I use five different word-association games that get students to recall, describe, explain, listen, and verbalize the subject-specific vocabulary from that topic or unit of work.