CHAPTER TEN

1. CHAPTER TEN ASSESSING AND TEACHING CONTENT AREA LEARNING AND VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION

2. Chapter Overview • This chapter focuses on instructional practices for teaching vocabulary and content area information, making adaptations, and teaching learning strategies and study skills.

3. Teaching Content Area Information and Vocabulary • According to Rupley, Logan, and Nichols (1998), “vocabulary is the glue that holds stories, ideas, and content togethermaking comprehension accessible for children” (p. 339).

4. Teaching Content Area Information and Vocabulary • Students with a low vocabulary have a difficult time understanding what they read. • One of the important ingredients to reading is having adequate background knowledge and knowing the meaning of words.

5. Teaching Content Area Information and Vocabulary • After third grade, when content area texts contain more unfamiliar technical and abstract vocabulary words than primary-grade-level texts do, the cumulative vocabulary differences between students who are good readers and students who are poor readers gets larger. In fact, good readers know about twice as many words as do poor readers in the first grade, and as these students go through the grades, the gap widens.

6. Types of Vocabulary and Vocabulary Instruction • Two types of vocabulary: • Oral vocabulary: Refers to words that a reader recognizes in listen and uses in speaking. • Reading vocabulary: Refers to words that a reader recognizes or uses in print. • Two main approaches to teaching vocabulary: • Direct • Indirect

7. Teaching Vocabulary through Specific Word Instruction • Specific word instruction, or teaching individual words, helps students to build in-depth understanding not just of words meaning but of text reading. • Using oral language • Using preteaching before reading

8. Teaching Vocabulary through Word-Learning Strategies • In addition to specific word instruction, it is critical to teach students with word-leaning strategies that are supported by research include using: • Contextual analysis • Morphemic analysis • Dictionaries • Other reference aids

9. Contextual Analysis • Contextual analysis involves using the context or text that surrounds an unknown word as clues to reveal its meaning (Blachowicz and Ogle, 2001). • Writers provide several types of context clues in their text: • Definition • Synonym • Description • Contrast • Comparison

10. Morphemic Analysis • Morphemic analysis in vocabulary instruction involves breaking a word into morphemes, the smallest linguistic units that have meaning, and using their meanings to figure out the meaning of the whole word (Reed, 2008). • Several cautions should be considered when planning morphemic analysis instruction: • First, this strategy works with a limited set of words; therefore, morphemic analysis instruction should not be too long. • Second, only one or two prefixes or suffixes should be introduced at a time with an emphasis on their applications to unfamiliar words.

11. Using Dictionaries and Other Reference Aids • It is important for students to learn how to use dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauruses to help broaden and deepen their word knowledge Using dictionaries and other reference aids can be a difficult task for young students for several reasons: (see next slide).

12. Using Dictionaries and Other Reference Aids (continued) • Definitions often contain words that students do not understand. • Although using dictionaries and other reference aids is an important word building strategy students can use while reading, students should not look up every unknown word.

13. Assessing Vocabulary • Vocabulary is perhaps one of the most difficult areas of reading and content learning to assess. • Vocabulary is also difficult because there are many different levels of knowing what a word means.

14. Progress Monitoring of Students’ Vocabulary and Concept Learning • The first step is to identify the words and concepts that students most need to know and understand for the text or unit to make sense to them. • Although it is tempting to select a lot of words for instruction, the most important goal is to select words that have high impact on learning and comprehension.

15. Family and Vocabulary Acquisition • Teachers can suggest the following activities: • Play with words by rhyming, finding synonyms and antonyms, or categorizing words. • Select a family word of the day – a difficult word that you or your child chooses. • Read and discuss the vocabulary you see in the community on billboards, signs, at the grocery store, and so on.

16. Family and Vocabulary Acquisition • Teachers can also suggest ways to improve reading at home: • Choose books that your child is interested in reading. • Before reading a story aloud or listening to your child read, select a few difficult words and give simple definitions using familiar language. • During reading, tell your child to listen for the vocabulary words, and encourage the child to use clues in the story to find out what they mean. • After reading, ask questions to help your child explain and describe what has been read.

17. Family and Vocabulary Acquisition • Games that encourage vocabulary development can also be played at home. For example, word games such as Scrabble, Scattegories, Balderdash, and Taboo expose children to new words and encourage them to use a wide range of vocabulary.

18. Teaching Content Area Reading Through Content Enhancement • To teach content area information in any subject, a teacher must teach the important concepts and vocabulary and their relationships. The goal is to enhance the content and teach related vocabulary so that the “critical features of the content are selected, organized, manipulated, and complemented in a manner that promotes effective and efficient information processing” (Lenz, Bulgren, and Hudson, 1990, p. 132).

19. Content Enhancements • Content enhancements are techniques to help students identify, organize, and comprehend important content information (Bulgren et al., 2006, 2009). In addition, content enhancements inform students of the purpose of instruction and increase student motivations (Mastropieri and Scruggs, 2000).

20. Content Enhancements • Several types of content enhancements have been developed and recommended: • advance organizers • concept diagrams • comparison tables • semantic feature analysis, or semantic maps • concept mastery • anchoring • comparison routines

21. Teaching Content Area Reading Through Content Enhancement: A Process for Teaching • Selecting the “big idea” of content learning • Selecting concepts and related vocabulary • Evaluating instructional materials • Readability • Considerate or user-friendly text • Structure • Coherence • Audience appropriateness • Assessing students’ background knowledge

22. Using Prelearning Activities • Limited background knowledge signals the teacher that students need more instruction to learn the information that will be presented in a text or lecture. Teachers can present any number of prelearning activities—such as advance organizers, semantic feature analysis, semantic mapping, and concept diagrams—that students can use before reading an assigned text or listening to a lecture. All these activities enhance the content and have been referred to as content enhancement devices(Bulgren, et al., 2007; Walther-Thomas and Brownell, 2000).

23. Making Adaptations • Why do classroom teachers make relatively few instructional adaptations for students with disabilities? • Adapting instructional materials takes time. • Adaptations often slow down instruction. • Some teachers think that making adaptations for the few students that need them is not fair to the higher-achieving students who are ready to work at a faster pace.

24. Adaptations • Adapting textbooks • Study guides • Text highlighting • Using alternative reading materials

25. Adapting Class Assignments and Homework • Assignments for students with disabilities should be brief, focused on reinforcement rather than new material, monitored carefully, and supported through parental involvement. (Cooper and Nye, 1994; Cooper, 2007) • Especially for students with special needs, we do not want homework to result in a “battle” between parents and students. One way to prevent this is to is to give complete information for assignments. Having complete information helps to motivate students, as does giving them real-life assignments (i.e., assignments that connect homework to events or activities in the home) plus reinforcement, using homework planners, and graphing homework completion. (Bryan and Sullivan-Burstein, 1998).

26. Constructing and Adapting Tests • The best way to discover what students have learned is to construct student-friendly tests, adapt test administration and scoring as necessary, consider alternatives to testing (such as assessment portfolios), and teach test-taking skills.

27. Study Skills and Learning Strategies • Three types of study skills: • Personal development skills • Personal discipline, management and organizational skills, self-monitoring and reinforcement, and positive attitudes toward studying • Process skills • Technical methods of studying such as note-taking, outlining, learning information from a text, and library reference skills • Expression skills • Retrieval skills, test-taking skills, and using oral and/or written expression to demonstrate understanding

28. Personal Development Skills • Time management and scheduling • Building a rationale • Determining how time is spent • Estimating time • Scheduling • Monitoring and using a to-do list

29. Self-Monitoring and Reinforcement • Make a list of goals, set the order, set the date. • Arrange a plan for each goal and predict your success. • Run your plan for each goal and adjust if necessary. • Keep records of your progress. • Evaluate your progress toward each goal. • Reward yourself when you reach a goal, and set a new goal.

30. Classroom Participation • Sit up. • Lean forward. • Activate your thinking. • Name key information. • Track the talker.

31. Assignment Completion(continued) • An important part of assignment completion and class participation in inclusive classrooms is recruiting positive teacher attention. Students with learning and behavior problems often get the teacher’s attention for their negative behaviors rather than their positive behaviors in class. Using instruction, role play, and reinforcement, one special education teacher taught four middle school students with learning disabilities to recruit positive teacher attention in their general education classrooms (Alber et al., 1999). Students were taught to raise their hands and wait quietly or at an appropriate time to ask such questions as “How am I doing?” or “I don’t understand” or “Would you please look at my work?”

32. Process Skills • Listening and taking notes • Teaching students to take notes • Direct instruction in note-taking • Outlining • Learning information from text • SQ3R • Multipass • Research and library skills

33. Expression Skills • Includes: • Memory • Retrieval • Test-taking skills • Other oral and/or written expression skills