Education Week - May 13, 2015 - Special Report - S12

S12 |
EDUCATION WEEK MAY 13, 2015
n
Building Literacy Skills > www.edweek.org/go/buildingliteracy
Tiered
Vocabulary
but,
they,
know
These are the most commonly used words
in the English language-the ones used in
everyday speech. Children whose first language
is English typically do not have trouble with
them. They are therefore not often the focus of
classroom discussion.
+
layers,
solid,
surface
These words, sometimes called general
academic words, appear in many types of texts
and are transferable across disciplines. They
offer more precise ways of saying simple things
("saunter" vs. "walk"), and can sometimes be
difficult to define using context clues.
+
molten,
magma,
lava
Also known as domain-specific words, these
less commonly used words are specific to
a discipline or field of study. They are more
common in informational texts than in literature.
Because these words are "hard," or uncommon,
authors often define them within a text.
+
SOURCE: COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS, APPENDIX A
CONTINUED FROM PAGE S10
vocabulary is the way it's embedded
in domains of knowledge," said
Catherine E. Snow, a professor at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education
who specializes in language and
literacy development in children.
Too often, teachers end up "teaching
lists of words instead of talking
to [students] about who Rembrandt
was or what the Paleozoic Age was
like," she said.
Gathering Texts
The idea is that by hearing academic
words in one context again
and again, students will attach
deeper meaning to them and be able
to use them in other contexts.
Center City started embedding
vocabulary instruction within topics,
using the Core Knowledge curriculum,
at the beginning of last year.
"I initially saw it and was like, 'You
want me to teach 6-year-olds about
colonial independence and Mesopotamia?'
But it's been so much fun,"
said Adrienne Williams, a 1st grade
teacher at Center City.
She now has pupils read and listen
to multiple texts about a single topic
that use similar tier-two words. For
instance, in a unit on habitats, the
class read a book on the world's rarest
animals and two books on endangered
species, watched the "Rainforest
Rap" video by the World Wildlife
Fund, and used the Brainpop Jr. online
videos and lessons on the topic.
Students continually heard words
such as "predator," "survive," "adaptations,"
"coexist," and "temperate."
Finding supplemental texts can
be "a lot of work," said Ms. Williams.
She pulled several of her units together
through the "text-set project,"
a professional-development program
led by Student Achievement Partners
in which teams of educators
gather packages of readings and
"
I initially saw it and was
like, 'You want me to
teach 6-year-olds about
colonial independence
and Mesopotamia?' But
it's been so much fun."
ADRIENNE WILLIAMS
Teacher, Center City Charter School
multimedia resources around a single
topic. The text sets that teachers
craft during those two-day sessions
are made available for free on Edmodo,
a social-media site for teachers.
While it's fairly easy to find texts
with the same vocabulary words, she
said, "the trick was finding texts at a
developmentally appropriate level."
'Going Deep'
Throughout the year, pupils will be
introduced to 11 different topics, or
units, in Ms. Williams' class.
"We're providing them with basic
knowledge about the world that's
going to teach them about unfamiliar
things," she said. "Going deep
into social studies and science topics,
the background knowledge they
have to pull from is much more vast."
Students are better able to cold-read
unfamiliar texts, she said, under the
new method-just as they have to do
on the common-core-aligned tests.
TIER 3 examples
TIER 2 examples
TIER 1 examples
http://www.edweek.org/go/buildingliteracy
Education Week - May 13, 2015 - Special Report

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - May 13, 2015 - Special Report
