Reflection #7: Meaning Vocabulary

In any content area and any level, vocabulary is a main component in lessons and more importantly, conversations. This is why vocabulary is an essential key to success. If students are going to communicate with us and listen to our instruction, they need to know the terms. This is an issue I’m having in my class, and this is why I was so thankful and excited to read this article, Meaning Vocabulary. The authors of this chapter laid out seven specific strategies to help students develop their vocabulary skills and knowledge. Out of these seven, I really gravitated toward a few of the strategies: List-Group-Label, Feature Analysis, Word Mp, and Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy. I liked these due to the fact that I could see these strategies being the most appealing to my students, but also, these have a realistic implementation to the daily lesson and classroom. As I read the other strategies, Possible Sentences, Contextual Redefinition, and Levin’s Keyword Method, they seemed as if they would be very abstract in a mathematical class. I think these all would work great in an English or Reading class where students can make these redefinitions and possible sentences, but I think some strategies are content sensitive.

Overall, I think this chapter was very useful, and I think I can use some strategies to help my students. I think the authors broke each strategy down in a very helpful way for the reader to see how each strategy would work, who the strategy is targeted at, and what purpose each strategy serves. Hopefully with these new strategies in my repertoire, my students will be able to converse with me and understand what I am saying!