How Does Vocabulary Development Work?

This is your brain.

This is your brain when you’re at a White Sox game and you hear, “Strike!”

This is your brain when you’re watching a news report on Iraq and you hear, “Strike!”

This is your brain when you’re reading about U.S. labor history and you come to the word, “Strike.”

What do you notice about your brain when it hears the word, “Strike,” in different contexts?

What does this imply about how words are learned and remembered?

What does this imply about how new vocabulary should be developed?

“Research shows” that learning new vocabulary so that it is understood across multiple uses and contexts requires multiple active exposures across multiple active occasions and contexts.

“Research also shows” that being able to use new vocabulary in appropriate ways requires even more long-term exposure and opportunities to practice the use of new words in supportive, reinforcing contexts.

Our brains are not filing cabinets. We do not fill them with alphabetized lists when we learn new words.

And yet this is how most vocabulary gets taught in schools.

This explains why most vocabulary instruction fails miserably in schools.

In other words, the most ineffective way to teach and develop new vocabulary is to:

Give students long lists of words with their definitions; or

Have students look up the definitions of words in the dictionary, copy them down, and use them in a sentence; or

Teach the words carefully once and then never revisit them again.

However, “research also shows” that the quickest and most powerful thing a teacher can do to improve the reading comprehension of students is to teach and develop new vocabulary.

So, then, what does “research show” to be the most effective ways to teach and develop vocabulary?

Good question…