Ms O’Connor is planning to start a unit on food and nutrition with her second year class. As part of planning the learning objectives and content for the class, she identified several terms that would be critical for her students to understand: function, nutrient, composition, classification, source and deficiency.
These terms are principles that the students will need to know and use when referring to all nutrients. In their literacy plan her school had chosen dictionary skills as a skill they wished students to develop. Therefore, Ms O’Connor decided to use a dictionary to introduce the students to the definitions of the words as they pertained to Home Economics.
On the day she began the unit, Ms O’Connor introduced the topic of nutrition. She gave the students a brief overview of the topic and explained that there were some important words they needed to understand for the topic. She then wrote the terms function, nutrient, composition, classification, source, deficiency on the board.
She read the words out loud and, then, asked her students “Have any of you used these words before? If so, tell me when and how you have used them.” As students offered some of the ways in which they have used the terms, Ms O’Connor recorded those meanings on the board. For example, students identified that they had met the word ‘source’ in both history and geography and Ms O’Connor recorded this beside the word on the board. For other words e.g. nutrients, the students were able to describe where it is used but could not explain what it meant.
Afterwards, Ms O’Connor then told her students, “You already know ways many of these words can be used. For some of the words, you can explain how it is used but not what it means. You also know that the same word can have a different meaning when it is used in a different context or for a different purpose for example source means something different in history and geography. Let’s call / all of the meanings you have given me the ‘other meanings’ because these are the meanings of the words in other situations.”
Ms O’Connor then began to introduce the meanings of the words as they pertained to the unit on nutrition. “For our unit on nutrition, you are going to learn another way that each of these terms can be used. In order to do this, we are going to engage in a short activity using our dictionaries.”
She divided the students into pairs and distributed a student dictionary to every pair. In a previous lesson, Ms O'Connor had explicitly modelled the use of a dictionary. She quickly revised the rules for using a dictionary with the class. The pairs were then set the task to look the words and find the explanation that most matched its use when speaking about nutrition. The students recorded the definitions in their copybooks.
Ms O’ Connor took feedback from the class about their choice of definitions. As the students called out the definitions, she asked clarifying questions about their choice of definition and added to their knowledge by giving supplementary information. She then recorded the definitions on the board. “Let’s call each of these the Home Economics/nutrition meanings so that we know they are the definitions we need to apply when we are talking about nutrition.” These meanings were then written into the students’ notes copy.
Ms O’Connor closed the activity that day by reviewing the terms with students and reading the passage in the textbook that corresponded to the words covered. She re-emphasised the importance of understanding these terms and explained that tomorrow they would be looking at thenutrient called protein, its functions, sources, composition, classification and deficiencies.
Maths Vignette – Vocabulary Instruction – Mr.Patten
Mr. Patten was planning to start a unit on data analysis with his first years. In reviewing the chapter on statistics and probability, he identified four terms that would be critical for his students to understand: mean, median, mode, and range. He decided to pre-teach these words. Thesewords are also ones that students might use with different meanings in their everyday lives or in other classes.
Mr. Patten decided to implement two vocabulary instructional practices to support his students’ learning.
- He planned to use a concept map to initially draw out the students’ understanding of the words in other contexts.
- He planned to highlight the meaning of the word in the context of data analysis using an active investigation strategy. He then planned to add the mathematical definition to the concept map based on the students’ understanding.
At the start of the lesson, Mr. Patten wrote the terms mean range, median and mode on the board and asked his students if they had encountered the words before. He recorded their replies as ‘other meanings’
Other MeaningsMean / Not nice, Intend to, Defined as
Range / Area for practicing golf, The amount of musical notes someone can sing, For cooking
Median / Edge of the road
Mode / Type of functioning for electronic devices. Method or type (eg transport)
He then pointed out that the same word can have a different meaning when it is used in a different context or for a different purpose. He explained that the lesson was about statistics or how to organise and explain data. Mean, range, median and mode are all ways of organizing and explaining data
To further explain this he used this activity:
1)He distributed a few cent coins to every student. Some students had the same number of cents, but most students had a different amount.
2)He then instructed the students to arrange themselves in an ascending line, so that the person with the fewest cents was at the end on the left side of the room, and the person with the greatest number of cents was at the right side of the room.
3)When they were in order, he used this line of students to demonstrate how these words also had a mathematical meaning. He asked specific questions of the students to answer which revealed the intended mathematical meaning of each of the words to the students.
4)He called each of these the mathematical meaningas they are the relevant definitions appliedwhen talking about data analysis
Other Meaning / Mathematical MeaningMean / Not nice, Intend to, Defined as / Average
Range / Area for practicing golf
The amount of musical notes someone can sing
For cooking / The difference between the highest and lowest
values
Median / Edge of the road / Middle most value when the numbers are in value order
Mode / Type of functioning for electronic devices
Method or type (eg transport) / Most frequently occurring value
5)Mr. Patten closed the activity that day by reviewing the terms with students through a series of questions, such as:
- Sandra wants everyone to have the same amount of cents so she needs to know what?
- Mark wants two things to be equal: the number of people who have fewer cents than he has, and the number of people who have more cents than he has. So, what does he need to know?
- Tom doesn’t care if he has only a couple cents as long as he is part of the group with the most people in it, so he needs to know what?
- Claire wants to know who has (a) the least coins and (b) the most coins, so what does she need to find out?
These questions tested the students’ knowledge of the mathematical meanings of the new concept vocabulary. It also provided the students with opportunities for further exposures to the vocabulary.
p. 11 Mrs. Rice History TeacherMrs. Riceis about to introduce the topic of the American war of independence to her second year class.
Mrs. Rice had identified fifteen possibly new but importantwords related to the topic. Of those fifteen words, she identified eight that were concept words and that would need extra work. She decided to use a group work activity to pre-teach these words. The other words were specific terms- names of battles, places etc. that she could teach in context.
The concept words that Mrs. Rice decided to pre teach were: Democracy, Monarchy, Divinity, Enlightenment, Revolution, Colony, Taxation, and Constitution.
Mrs. Rice began by activating the students’ prior knowledge on the topic ‘The American War of Independence’. She asked the students a series of questions relating to previous chapters and to their own prior knowledge of the War of Independence from books, films and other sources. Mrs. Rice jotted some of their ideas on the board. She then began to introduce the topic herself: “Today we are going to consider some important factors that led up to the American war of independence. We are not only going to learn what happened but consider how and why it happened”
Mrs. Rice then divided the class into small groups of three or four and gave each student a role (leader, recorder, time-keeper, presenter). She gave the groups a hand-out with each of the key concept terms, a simple definition and a sentence using the term in a way that would be accessible to the students. / She then gave the following instructions:
“As a team, I want each of you to read each word and its definition, and then I want you to think about how each of the words might apply to why the American War of Independence might have happened.
I want you to think about the context we discussed at the beginning but also the meanings of some of these words. I then want you, as a group, to use the vocabulary to tell the story of why you think the war might have happened.”
While the groups were working, Mrs. Rice circulated the room checking in with the students to see if they were all participating and to answer any clarifying questions. She then reconvened the groups and listened to their accounts. She asked the other students to comment on the accounts- did they agree/ disagree, emphasising, all the while, the importance of using the vocabulary of the text.
Finally for homework, Mrs. Rice asked the class to read the four pages of the text book where the lead up to the War of Independence is introduced. She asked them to adjust their own accounts as necessary. She also asked that every student come to class the next day with at least one question about what they had read.
p. 12 Construction Lesson Vignette
Mrs. McKeon was about to read a complex text which presented unfamiliar technical vocabulary to her Construction Studies class. The reading was in preparation for the essay style question in the exam. This reading exercise demanded the following suite of strategies.
1. Pre-teaching before beginning the text
a) She tapped into her students’ prior experience of dividing words into parts i.e. prefixes, roots and suffixes. This was part of an agreed literacy core team approach across a range of subject departments. Students all had a list of common prefixes and suffixes in their journals and could refer to this list as they read in different subject areas. In cases where the list was insufficient, she taught the students to refer to a dictionary. Each student also had access to a student dictionary.
2. She also encouraged students to keep a record of the new words in their copybooks. Students were obliged to record at least five new words in this way, which they would subsequently use in writing assignments on the topic.
3. When teaching this strategy, Mrs. McKeon used the explicit model of instruction. The purpose of this was so that students could eventually apply the strategies they had learned from her, when working by themselves.
4. First Mrs. McKeon modelled how she would work out the meaning of a word using a ‘think aloud’.
This is the sample sentence which Mrs. McKeon used to model her thought process: ’The most remarkable feature of this multipartite development, the Titanic signature building in Belfast, is the unusual design that represents the bow of the boat.’
First, she considered the word’s place in the sentence and the context– “In the sentence the word comes before development therefore must describe the building.” She then broke the word in to its different parts. She modelled her thought process aloud for the students. “Multi is a prefix which I’ve seen in another context, multi -purpose, meaning many purposes. The root word is part. I know what this means. So now I can guess the word means many parts. I wonder what the suffix ‘ite’ means. I will check my list. The list tell me that ‘ite‘ as a suffix turns a word into an adjective. It adds nothing to the meaning. Putting all my learning together I now can guess that a multipartite development means a development that has many parts” Mrs. McKeon then checked the dictionary to confirm the meaning.
The next time she came across a difficult word, Mrs. McKeon encouraged the students to help her to work out the meaning of the word using the prefixes, the root and suffixes. She did this with a few words and when she felt the students were ready, she encouraged them to try the methodthemselveswith other new words they saw in the text. The students worked together and wrote the new words in their copybooks and Mrs. McKeon was available to help them when they needed it.
Eventually the students were able to use the strategy independently when they met words that they did not know in a text.
p. 13 Mr. Stack and Ms. Long – 1st Year Junior Certificate Science ClassMs. Long and Mr. Stack were working on teaching a unit of work on the topic ‘Force and Motion’.
In reviewing the text book and the PowerPoint presentation that she would be using to teach the topic, Ms. Long identified 21 technical terms that were unique to her topic and necessary for students to understand the text. In addition, she identified that there were 11 more non-technical academic terms that she anticipated would be unfamiliar and challenging to some her students. Mr. Stack and Ms. Long agreed that their students would be overwhelmed if presented with a list of 32 unfamiliar terms prior to beginning the topic.
Ms. Long and Mr. Stack examined the students’ texts and saw that several of the words had sufficient contextual support. Ms. Long and Mr. Stack agreed that when the book provided additional contextual support, they would: 1. Explicitly teach the students (in advance and during) how to use and apply the additional contextual information and 2. Check that students were doing this and provide additional supporting information where necessary.
Mr. Stack felt that a couple of words on the list only required superficial instruction. After separating the words that needed contextual support and those that only needed a simplified definition, Ms. Long and Mr. Stack were left with 13 words. These thirteen words were the key concepts and academic language that would be encountered and used frequently when reading, completing activities, engaging in discussion, and making connections to other units of work. The teachers, therefore, plannedseveral methods of building students’ knowledge of these terms recursively. / throughout the unit. They also decided it was important to pre teach some of the key concept vocabulary prior to reading the text.
The first activity involved an active investigative activity designed to build background knowledge by providing a concrete example of force and motion. Ms. Long introduced this to her students by saying “We are going to be studying motion- or a physical change in the position or location of an object. To help you explore what happens when an object begins or ends its motion, we are going to engage in a short activity.”
Ms. Long gave pairs of students a tennis ball and a 3kg exercise ball each. She asked the students to perform a series of actions that involved tapping, rolling and stopping the balls on the floor. After each experiment, she asked the students a series of questions that guided them in talking informally about Newton’s laws of motion. As students explained target vocabulary in their own words, Ms. Long provided the scientific term for what was being described. For example, when one student said it was harder to make the heavier exercise ball roll than the lighter tennis ball, Ms. Long recast the response “So it took more force for you to accelerate an object of greater mass?”
Each time a term was introduced Ms. Long wrote it on the board along with a basic definition. She then asked her students to record the term in their notebooks along with their observations of the tennis and exercise balls that demonstrated that concept. She ended the lesson by explaining that the next day they would use the definitions as a reference tool when reading a passage explaining Newton’s first law of motion.
p. 14 Vocabulary Vignette Activity Sheet