Chapter 8: Developing Vocabulary and Concepts

Chapter 8: Developing Vocabulary and Concepts

1. Experiences

   • Students learn concepts through hands on experiences.

2. Concepts

   • Create Mental Images, which may represent anything that can be grouped together
     • Objects, symbols, ideas, processes, or events
   • Form Concepts
     • A concept that is bound by a hierarchy of relationships: A category of concepts

3. Words

   • Labels for Concepts

4. Graphic Organizers

   • A diagram that uses content vocabulary to help students anticipate concepts and their relationships to one another in the reading material.
     • These concepts are displayed in an arrangement of key technical terms relevant to the important concepts to be learned.
       • Analyze the vocabulary, and list important words, Arrange the list of words, Add to the scheme vocabulary terms that you believe the students understand.,Evaluate the organizer, introduce the students to the learning task, and as you complete the learning task, relate new information to the organizer.

5. Reinforcing and Extending Vocabulary Knowledge

   • Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA):
     • Establishes a meaningful link between students' prior knowledge and words that are conceptually related to one another.
   • Categorization Activities
     • Vocabulary extension exercises involving categorization require students to determine relationships among technical terms much as words sorts do.

6. Vocabulary Building Strategies

   • Using context and Approximate meaning
     • Typographic Clues
       • Format clues: footnotes, italics, boldface print, parenthetical definitions, pictures, graphs, charts.
     • Syntactic and Semantic Clues
       • Help students visualize the inquiry process necessary to reveal meaning,.
     • Logographic Cues
       • Visual symbols that represent a word.
     • Context-related activities
       • Modified Cloze Passages, OPIN.
         • Modified Cloze Passages: Deleting words, and having students supply the words during or after reading.
         • OPIN: Stands for Opinion, Choosing the best word for the sentence.
     • Word Structure
       • Morphemic analysis: Using the identifying parts of the word to predict meaning of the word.

7. Activating Prior Knowledge about Words

   • Word Exploration
     • Writing-to-learn: A strategy that works well as a vocabulary activity.
       • Freewriting: Writing quickly and spontaneously for no more than 5 minutes, without worry about spelling, neatness, grammar, or punctuation.
     • Activates schemata and jog long-term memory
     • Brainstorming
       • Allows students to generate what they already know
       • List-group-label: Allows students to group words and ideas into logical arrangements
     • Word Sorts
       • Students sort out technical terms that are written on cards or listed on an exercise sheet.
       • Open and Closed Sorts
         • In closed sorts, students know in advance of sorting what the main categories are. Open sorts prompt divergent and inductive reasoning.
     • Knowledge Ratings
       • This gets readers to analyze what they know about the topic.