In my experience at schools where reading proficiency has typically been very low, I have seen tons of training, computer programs, and small groups in classrooms.... In fact, oftentimes, I see very little whole-group teaching outside of the read-aloud.
When I first step into these schools, I notice that almost every classroom tends to handle reading instruction differently, most likely based upon a combination of the district's expectations, instructional leadership at the school, teacher's years of experience, professional development available to staff, classroom management, and a whole host of other factors that impede consistency and efficacy in the classroom.
I traveled to more than 20 states as an educational consultant and I very often started my sessions with this question for teachers: Imagine that your principal came into to your classroom and said, "Listen, we are making some changes to reading instruction. I'm letting you choose the two most crucial elements/features/practices that I'm not allowed to touch." What are those two things that are most important?
Many of the same answers popped up around the room:
small-group instruction
phonics instruction
read-aloud
Heggerty lessons
word work
centers
Lexia practice (or iReady, IXL, Reading A-Z, or something else)
independent reading time
leveled libraries
Not once in all those sessions at all those different schools in all those states did teachers mention vocabulary development or background knowledge.
What makes vocabulary so important?
Over and over, I wondered how to address vocabulary with my students, whether they were in my classroom when I was the teacher or "mine" when I was the principal of the school.
We all know that any number of factors can affect a child's learning experience. Very, very generally speaking, students whose parents spent time with them, talked to them normally (without simplifying language too much), played games with them, asked their opinions, and read to them -- these kids all tended to do much better in school.
Let's be honest about it. A single parent who works late, maybe takes the bus home, and then has to cook, clean, and care for multiple children is not as likely to have much time or energy left over for supporting learning, at least, not with consistency. If we're really being honest about it, chances are the child is probably not in a place to learn at home either. Most kids want to play in their free time, and if the parent has been absent or is tired, the child certainly wants time to be fun with the parent and not educational.
So, post-read-aloud, when students are asked questions about the text, they might have drifted off when it became too hard to understand. Or perhaps, the child could understand the text, but did not have enough vocabulary to convince the teacher he knew what it was about.
What does this look like in action?
Let's dissect this. The teacher wants to engage students with questions about the text. She asks a question about a particular moment in the story. Reasonable so far. An administrator observing this lesson might even say it's low DOK/recall only. But, in the picture, we see that Randy can't really grasp the concept or explain his thinking.
Chances are, Randy understands the idea of building a tower of blocks, but he might have gotten stuck on the phrase, a dozen stories high. First of all, stories is a multi-meaning word. (It's easier to distinguish in British English because it's spelled story and storey). The student may not have heard the "level" version of "story," so he gets confused and his answer shows this.
Furthermore, many students will not necessarily know what a dozen means exactly, but they're likely to have heard it or can guess its meaning based on all the other things they hear from the text.
Even if Randy can infer the gist of this page, he still has a hard time explaining what he understands. Classmates of Randy's who have a larger vocabulary can at least search their brains for other words they know to explain what they know. Potential summaries could look like this:
I can build with the blocks!
The closet is tall like the tower.
She stacked the blocks...tall...as the teacher!
An English Learner might have a hard time with even more words: tower, build, high, or the construction can + build.
Not convinced yet? How about another example?
The case of the frog in the pond
When I first became a dual-language immersion teacher, I had a Kindergarten class of students, half of whom were native Spanish speakers and half who were native English speakers. We did most of our academics in Spanish, and students learned to read in Spanish first.
Spanish is much easier to read (and pronounce and spell) than English. It has a shallow orthography, which means there aren't any mix-ups with words like cough and though; header and reader; or flood, good, and food. Whatever the letter sound is, it's always that sound.
So, I would test my kids' reading abilities formally three times per year. At the beginning of the year, my English speakers couldn't even understand the directions for what to do on the test because they were in Spanish. As we got toward the mid-year test, though, my kids could understand the directions and they could decode words like nobody's business.
On the surface, my kids were "fluent" readers after only a few months in school, regardless of their background, home language, home life, attention span, etc.
However, English speakers had been exposed to far fewer vocabulary words in Spanish, and their counterparts had a five-year head start on them with hearing and speaking Spanish every day. When I tested the English speakers, they read beautifully, but when I asked what the text was about, they had trouble communicating what they knew. It was especially challenging if the question involved more advanced skills like critical thinking, inference, or predictions.
In this example, the text says, "The frog lives in the lake."
The illustrations help the student to understand the scene, but estanque (pond) is a more advanced word. Students probably know rana (frog) and vive (lives), but they might have to guess the rest.
Flip this over to the English Learner's experience. Or think about the student who has spent a lot of time playing Roblox but little time reading about nature or science. They can do a lot of guessing, but that's not reading. And even if they understand the text, the assessment has a list of what they must mention to prove they understood it.
Background knowledge
Literacy curricula are now including activities to address background knowledge as part of the reading lesson.
Consider this example of how important background knowledge can be: As a traveling educational consultant, I often observed teaching and offered feedback. I watched a teacher do a great lesson on Interrupting Chicken for her first graders.
It's a great story about self-control, in which a chicken's dad tries to read her a bedtime story but she keeps interrupting him.
When he starts reading Hansel and Gretel, Little Chicken shouts out that the lady is a witch! So, Papa switches to other stories like Little Red Riding Hood, and Chicken Little, but Little Chicken just can't stop interrupting with the end of the story.
All I could think while the teacher was reading this was, I wonder how many of these kids know these stories. I realize these stories are classics that many children around the world know about, but there is so much content available to kids to consume, and these stories may be familiar to people my age, but maybe not so with the younger crowd.
For instance, when I ask a group of teachers who are over 40 what they did every Saturday morning in their childhood, they all yell out, "Watch cartoons!" There were only a few channels and a standard selection of cartoons available to watch at a very specific time each week. When I ask them what their students do every Saturday morning, the answers are varied and teachers are often stumped: "Roblox?" "Youtube unpackaging videos?" "Playstation?" "iPad games?"
A simple, informal poll with students about a few of the fairy tales before reading could tell the teacher whether or not she needs to pre-teach some concepts so that students really know what is happening in the book.
Although this is a very specific case for background knowledge, we can also think about a child whose parents immigrated from another country and told him a different set of stories. There might be a student whose mom decided she hated the violence implicit in those stories as a child, so she didn't read them to her own child; instead, she may have read him new titles by diverse authors about more relevant topics. An English learner may not understand that Red Riding Hood is the character's name. All these things are possible without the requisite background knowledge.
What do you think? Have I made a case for a focus on vocabulary and background knowledge? How do you address these in your classroom?
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