Academic Vocabulary Toolkit

Academic Vocabulary Toolkit

Charissa McMurray

What is word consciousness?

Word conciousness is when someone is curious and interested about words and their meaning. They can use what they know to help understand the word such as synonyms and contact clues. This can be done by discussions and games. Examples: Word hunt will encourage students to look for certain words in texts they are reading. This will keep the students engaged and motivated while reading. This helps students relate the word to real reading experiences. Word wall is vocabulary words that are on a wall or worksheet that is alphabetically order. It helps students to interact with words every day

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Word wall

Word hunt

A word wall is useful when using vocabulary words about a certain topic. This can be used in science to use vocabulary words about a cell to put vocab in alphabet order.

When working with vocabulary words in a book. It is a good idea to use word hunt so students cans try to find the vocabulary words while reading the book.

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A helpful strategy - Cognates

From the book, one helpful strategy for Emergent Bilingual students would be using and looking for certain word parts such as cognates. Cognates are word parts that are similar in other langauges. This way Emergent Bilingual students can use knowledge that they already know to figure out what a word means.

A challenging strategy - RIP/Shooting Stars

From the book, one challenging strategy for Emergent Bilingual students would be by seperating words in RIP or Shooting Stars catergories. The RIP catergory are all the words that are overused in writing and speaking. The Shooting Stars catergory are more complex words that can be synonyms to RIP words. This can be difficult for an Emergent Bilingual student because they may still be struggling with the RIP words and are not ready for the Shooting Stars words.

Scaffold instruction

A way to make the challenging strategy more accessible is by making synonyms for vocabulary words that the student is almost fluent on. This way these words are individualize to the student's needs. Another way is to show the synoyms also translated to the student's L1 language. This way they can fully understand the defintion of the words.

Vocabulary Technique - Barbara Formoso’s lesson pt 1

This lesson focuses on making a visual representation of figurative language for students. She uses household items and with a flashlight in the dark she has students see a different version of this household item. This is different than traiditonal because she is not having the students write down the definition, but instead see a comparison in real life.

Vocabulary Technique - Barbara Formoso’s lesson pt 2

I would have my students fill out a T-chart. They will fill out the left side of the name of t he household item I am presenting and the right side with a short description. I will then turn off the lights and use a flashlight for the students to see a new version of this household item. An example is that a stapler can be a hungry alligator eating pages. This is effective for supporting academic vocabulary because figurative language can be hard to understand but having a visisble representative lesson can help open student's eyes