Philippot & Graves: Vocabulary Instruction in English Classes

In this weeks reading we read about vocabulary from our very own Raymond Philippot from St. Cloud and Michael Graves from the U of M. In this chapter the authors emphasize how vocabulary goes beyond elementary to the secondary level. All teachers are responsible for building students vocabulary, but as future English teachers we have more responsibility.

Learning vocabulary is important from the beginning time of a student. It is said that a student up to the 8th grade level should know about 25,000 reading vocabulary words and at the end of high school their reading vocabulary should consist of 50,000. This evens out to 10 words a day, including weekends and summers. It seems almost impossible to teach this amount of words, so as English teachers we must fill our classrooms with rich reading, discussion, and writing experiences so that our students will have incidental word learning.

I think this is a great way to look at how to learn vocabulary in the classroom. From my memory in school we the students always had some kind of vocabulary test on words we were forced to memorize. In my classroom I will promote incidental word learning by using our readings, discussions, and writing experiences. It would be a good learning experience for my students to find 10 vocabulary words in their reading they don't know and look up and make their own sentence. This can also be incorporated into using new vocabulary words in our discussion and their writings.
Also in this reading Philippot and Graves talk about how to teach individual words to our future students. There is step by step process with teaching them a word orally, or even using a glossary all of which are extremely helpful.

Most of all I enjoyed the section of Semantic Mapping. I have never seen this used before which really excites me to use it in the future. I like how when using this method the student finds more then just the definition. As mentioned before in my school years we always memorized the word and definition. With Semantic Mapping the student will not only have to know the definition, but also the uses, examples, non examples, and different types.

Overall, this chapter was extremely helpful to how to teach vocabulary to students in the most enriching way, something as a future teacher hasn't crossed my mind to often. After this chapter I've realized how important teach vocabulary will be to my students.