How to Help Students Expand Their Vocabulary
Students build their vocabulary by repeated exposure to new words in speech, reading and writing at home and at school. Developing varied and creative ways to teach students not only the meanings of unfamiliar words, but also how they're typically used in a sentence will help them remember the words and feel more comfortable using the new vocabulary on a regular basis.
Instructions
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Use, define and repeat effective, complicated words as often as possible when you speak to students and encourage them to use the words in speech and writing. Repetition of words and their meaning helps students to remember them.
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Teach students how to use a dictionary and thesaurus and cultivate the habit of looking up new words. Distributing pocket dictionaries that students can carry around with them during school will make them accessible and easier to use than larger ones, the Teacher Vision Web site advises.
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Encourage students to read vocabulary-rich books to increase their exposure to new words. Students can often figure out unfamiliar words' meanings from the way they're used in the sentence. These "context clues" may help them to remember their definitions, Teacher Vision explains
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Ask parents to engage in wide-ranging and complex conversations with students at home and to read aloud to young ones. The more exposure children have to language in all aspects of their lives, the more likely they are to learn, remember and use it. Much learning occurs in informal settings and through subtle exposure.
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Make a "word wall" to post frequently used words or those that students tend to confuse with others, Teacher Vision suggests. This helps to remind students of problematic words and why they tend to be misused. The "wall" can also serve as a reminder to both teachers and students to use these words more often.
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Find ways to have students share words and explore them in different ways, while incorporating group repetition to spur memorization. One example is the "Ten Words Plus Plan," explains the readwritethink Web site. In this approach, each student identifies what they think the 10 most important words are in an online article they have all read. Each student writes the 10 words on separate sticky notes, and the class combines all of the words in a graph. Words that are picked repeatedly are written in one column each time they are used. Every time a student mentions a word for the first time, it's written in a new column. Then the students explain why they selected each word as being important and look for synonyms, examples of the word in other articles and different forms of the word. This approach incorporates word repetition, which helps memorization. Also, selection of the 10 most important words helps students to put them in proper context.
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Tips & Warnings
Students from homes where English is spoken as a second language or whose parents have limited vocabularies may have more trouble learning and remembering the meanings of new words than other students. These pupils may need more attention or remedial education to improve their vocabulary-building skills.
