So learning only 600 words is a very small drop in a very big bucket. 600 words won’t make a dent in those numbers.Īccording to reading research, students need to learn 3,000 new words per year just to make year-to-year grade level progress (Honig 1983). But, the American lexicon is over 800,000 words. “Rote memorization of words and definitions is the least effective instructional method resulting in little long-term effect (Kameenui, Dixon, Carine 1987).”Įven if students were to remember all of the, say 20 words, on the weekly vocabulary word list for the entire school year, they would only have mastered 600 words. Students memorize the list for the Friday test and forget half of them by the next week. The problem is that this approach does not work. ![]() Pass it out on Monday have students look up and write down definitions, make game cards, do a crossword puzzle, do a word sort, write context clue sentences, etc. In many classrooms the predominant means of vocabulary instruction is weekly vocabulary word list. However, not all vocabulary instruction is effective or efficient. Most of us would agree with reading researchers that vocabulary development is critically important to improving reading comprehension (e.g., Anderson & Freebody, 1981 Baumann, Kame‘enui, & Ash, 2003). ![]() Following is a research-based argument as to why vocabulary word lists don’t work for vocabulary acquisition.
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