Chapter 8: Developing Vocabulary and Concepts

Chapter 8: Developing Vocabulary and Concepts

1. Types of Vocabulary from Textbooks

   • special: everyday words w/ adapted special meanings
   • general: everyday words with common usage
   • technical: words w/ a particular usage in a specialized field or content area

2. Methods for learning vocab

   • strategy
   • reflection
   • challenge

3. Concepts: represent anything that can be grouped together by common features or similar criteria:

   • Concept relationships: organization within a concept and the importance of subconcepts
     • hierarchy of superordinate and subordinate concepts
     • examples: a member of any concept being considered
     • relevant attributes: features, traits, properties, or characteristics common to every example of a particular group.
       • critical: necessary for everyone to know
       • variable: shared by some but not all
   • Connections between concepts

4. Graphic organizers

   • 1. Analyze to identify important words
     • 2. Arrange the list of words
       • 3. Add words that student should understand
         • 4. Evaluate the organizer
           • 5. Introduce students to the learning task
             • 6. Relate new information
   • tips for implementing graphic organizers (pg. 213-214)

5. Learning/Activating Words

   • Word Exploration: writing-to-learn strategy (freewriting)
   • Brainstorming
   • List-group-label
   • Word sorts
     • closed sort
     • open sort
   • Knowledge rating

6. Defining words in context

   • vocabulary self-collection strategy (VSS)
     • 1. Divide the class into teams
       • 2. Each group presents their word to the class
   • concept of definition (CD)

7. Reinforcing and Extending Vocab

   • Semantic feature Analysis (SFA)
   • Categorization Activities
   • Concept Circles
   • Vocabulary Triangles
   • Magic Squares

8. Vocabulary Building Strategies

   • Using context
     • typographic clues
     • syntactic clues
     • semantic clues
     • logographic clues
   • Context Acitvities
     • Modified Cloze Passages
     • OPIN(ion)
   • Word structure
   • Using the dictionary