8 Easy Strategies to Support Vocabulary Development

“The ball is in your court!” The words and phrases spoken to our students by the adults interacting with them can be a predictor of their long-term expressive vocabulary. This puts the ball in teachers’ courts to help support students’ vocabulary development. In this article, find ways to expose your students to words they will encounter in their future by using them in the context of everyday conversations.

The Importance of Vocabulary Work

Although we use fewer than 4,000 words regularly in everyday conversation, we know about 20,000 words (including words we use less often that articulate specific nuances, and topic-specific words for business communication). Learning new words and learning how to use them is vital for academic success.

When readers are learning to decode words, familiarity with vocabulary assists them, making the decoding work easier. When readers struggle, lack of vocabulary skills can keep them from progressing quickly. Consistent vocabulary development allows students to understand references, allusions, multiple points of view, and nuance in conversations. The more vocabulary they command, the more fluent they will be in academic content. Making vocabulary accessible to students fosters curiosity and helps them to develop lifelong learning skills.

Vocabulary Development Strategies

These eight strategies will assist teachers with vocabulary development in the classroom.

Tell Stories

Stories capture attention and involve imagination by using vocabulary and mental pictures. Students will be authentically engaged when listening to stories. When telling stories, teachers often use words and phrases that expose students to new words in context. Sometimes it is helpful to stop and explain a new word or phrasing to students, but with or without explanation, students often absorb the meaning within the context of the story. For example: “My dad had a paper route when he was young, and he always challenged us be independent and earn our own money as we matured.” The words in this example may be new to some students, but they will infer the meaning based on the context of the information in the sentence.

Use Idioms

Idioms and proverbs are a part of our linguistic culture. Students will understand language, conversation, and text better when they have a strong understanding of idioms. Use these phrases or sentences in context with students, then take just a minute to explain to students what they mean and how they are used as figurative speech. For example: “You have all been waiting to hear where we are going on our field trip, and I’m about to let the cat out of the bag!” As students get older, they understand these phrases more quickly, having heard them before, but young students and English language learners will need more explanation of their meanings.

Read Aloud

Reading aloud to students offers them a wealth of rich vocabulary. When students struggle with reading and are only independently exposed to the text they can read on level, they are missing opportunities to be exposed to higher level words and phrases. Reading aloud as a daily event improves vocabulary for struggling readers in the same way that independent reading does for stronger readers. Even stronger readers may hear a new word or phrase during a read aloud. Students like intriguing words, and when they are embedded in text with common language, they begin to absorb these into their receptive and expressive vocabulary.

Think Aloud

Teachers can share their own vocabularies with their students. Teachers can mentally process and think aloud, talking through their steps, using vocabulary to solve a problem or take them from one thought to another. The teacher’s wording will expose students to higher level thinking and vocabulary. For example: “When the author talks about how the character feels, I can see the author wants us to know that the character feels satisfied with winning the race because she talks about the smirk on her face and folding her arms across her chest in triumph.”

Talk Straight

Don’t “dumb down” the conversation! Use words and phrases that best fit the situation that will expose students to rich vocabulary. Students will instinctively use context to create meaning from the conversation. Look for opportunities to define the word in context, repeat the word several times, or encourage students to ask when they don’t understand so they are aware of their own understanding. For example: “The 0s at the end of a decimal point are superfluous. Let’s look at the number when we make it with our base ten blocks to see why we don’t need these 0s on the end, which makes them superfluous!”

Play Word Games

Making vocabulary fun is helpful for building memory and usage skills. When students are allowed to play around with words, they will learn how to mix words, to build words, and how synonyms, antonyms, and homophones work. When teachers use games to help reinforce concepts, memory is often stronger, and retention is higher. Here are some word game ideas that can be used successfully in the classroom.

One way to increase vocabulary skills is to offer students exposure to riddles, fun poems, and silly rhymes. Word play and figures of speech are a huge part of these genres and the vocabulary used in them expands student vocabulary. When students are allowed to combine humor with advancing vocabulary skills, they have a non-threatening way to learn. Fun words mixed with higher order thinking processes makes for a winning combination.

Teach Word Roots

When students are building vocabulary, a great way to assist them is to teach them word roots. When students learn a root, they become capable of constructing similarly related words that stem from that root. Students begin to understand meaning based on the root and can transfer than knowledge to other words that are closely related. It is important to make this learning fun, so that students stay engaged. Word roots activities can make a big impact on vocabulary work.

So, converse, dialogue, discuss, have discourse, communicate, engage in chitchat, or have a “heart-to-heart!” to look for new words, for new ways of saying old phrases, and use them with your students. Model having fun finding new words and demonstrate understanding when talking about language. Present new language acquisition in a positive light and encourage students to find their own new words and phrases and use them. Find your own ways to support vocabulary development in everyday conversation! The results will be rewarding as everyone learns new words.