difficulty, and the most frequent words
are most important to student learning.
Students appear to learn words in a
relatively consistent sequence as they
progress through the grades, and they
generally learn high-frequency words
first (Biemiller, 2003, 2005; Zeno,
Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995).
A number of word lists and tools
can help teacher teams identify high-frequency words for instruction. For
example, WordCount (www.word
count.org/main.php), an online tool
created by Jonathan Harris, presents the
86,800 most frequently used English
words, ranked in order of frequency.
There are also commercially available
word lists created from words that
students encounter in primary and
secondary school texts (Zeno, Ivens,
Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995), which are
also available in searchable software
versions through Questar Assessments
( www.questarai.com).
Teachers are often tempted to begin
and end vocabulary instruction
with dictionary definitions.
better than students who had only four.
To provide the multiple experiences
students need, we suggest that teachers
select just five to seven words to focus
on each week, planning at the start of
each week how to embed the word into
writing or debate prompts, homework
assignments, quizzes, and lessons.
Cross-content teaching teams can work
together, with teachers in each content
area taking responsibility for providing
instruction on the target words one day
of the week.
Teachers are often tempted to begin
and end vocabulary instruction with
dictionary definitions. Student-friendly
Ensure Repeated,
Rich Exposure
Probably the most consistent
finding related to good
vocabulary instruction is
that students need multiple
exposures to a word to learn
it well (Lawrence, 2009;
Nagy, Herman, & Anderson,
1985). Although some stu-
dents may come to a basic
understanding of a word after
one exposure, all students
need additional encounters in
different contexts to ensure
that they develop rich ortho-
graphic, phonological, and
semantic knowledge of the
word (Perfetti & Hart, 2002).
McKeown, Beck, Omanson,
and Pople (1985) found that
students who had 12 instruc-
tional encounters with target
words learned the words
Online Resources
for Vocabulary Instruction
To identify high-frequency cross-content words:
n The Academic Word List ( www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/
resources/academicwordlist)
n Word Count ( www.wordcount.org/main.php)
To create student-friendly word definitions:
n Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
( www.ldoceonline.com)
definitions do support learning (Bolger,
Balass, Landen, & Perfetti, 2008), but
teachers may find such definitions difficult to develop. A good online tool is
the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English ( www.ldoceonline.com),
which presents clear definitions using
only the 2,000 most common words in
English.
Definitions alone, however, are not
enough. If the purpose of vocabulary
instruction is to improve long-term
comprehension, the most effective
method is to provide students with multiple exposures to words in meaningful
contexts (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown,
1982). Some contexts make
the meaning of a target word
more transparent than others.
The sentence, The boy was
tardy does not provide much
of a clue to meaning for a
student who does not already
know what tardy means.
The sentence, The boy was 10
minutes tardy, so his teacher was
upset with him provides much
better support to help the
learner infer meaning. Because
it can be difficult to immediately come up with interesting sentences that provide
context for target word use,
we suggest that teachers write
them at the start of each week
as part of lesson planning.
To support students’ morphological skills and word
learning strategies:
n Visuword Online Graphical Dictionary (www
. visuwords.com/search)
n WordSift ( www.wordsift.com)
To obtain information about Word Generation, a
whole-school, cross-content vocabulary program,
Encourage Use and
Experimentation
Most secondary teachers have
encountered students who
overuse vague, general words
