Chapter Thirty One: Explaining Vocabulary Across Instructional Contexts
From: Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency by Fountas and Pinnell, 2006
Thirty-Five Ways to Integrate Vocabulary Instruction
Interactive
Read-Aloud and
Literature
Discussion
Shared Reading
Guided Reading
 Increase the amount of text that students encounter through read aloud
 Draw attention to the meaning of words before, during, and after reading aloud
to students
 Use intentional conversation that includes words students will be reading or
have heard you read
 Use interactive vocabulary lessons to deepen understanding of how a writer
has used a word to create meaning in a specific text
 Have students discuss words that they have found interesting or didn’t
understand
 While reading a familiar text, mask a word and have students predict it, talking
about its meaning in the sentence
 Select words from a familiar text and have students locate and discuss their
meaning
 Mask words and substitute alternative words (synonyms or antonyms) within a
text and discuss the way the substitution changes the meaning even if only
slightly.
 For a text produced through interactive or shared writing, have students
illustrate pages thinking about the meanings of the words.
 Highlight words within a text and help students connect them with other words
that have a similar meaning.
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Use new words in conversation during the introduction to the text
Discuss and locate new words during the introduction to a text
Help students connect new words to concepts they already know
For difficult and new ideas that are central to understanding the text, teach
both the concept and the word
Teach students specific strategies for deriving the meaning of words from
context
Teach and then prompt students to monitor their own understandings as they
read
Use word webs or similar interactive vocabulary techniques after students have
read new words in a text
Use semantic feature analysis to compare the words in the text and their
relationships
Have students revisit the text to discover hierarchical relationships among
concepts
Have students keep lists of new and interesting words in their reader’s
notebooks.
Independent
Reading
Word Study
Writing Workshop
 Ensure a large variety of texts for independent reading.
 Encourage students to use new words as they write about their reading in their
reader’s notebooks.
 During sharing, have students give examples of interesting new words they
have noticed.
 Teach students to make connections among words by meaning.
 Teach students to make connections in flexible ways – word part, part of
speech (noun, verb, etc.) affixes, sounds, meanings.
 Have students play Lotto, Concentration, and other games using synonyms,
antonyms, homophones, and homographs.
 Use poems to help students learn about synonyms, antonyms, onomatopoetic
words, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and metaphors.
 Teach many different kinds of words.
 Help students sort words by meaning.
 Help students understand the structure of a word and its relation to meaning.
 Have children make “sentence pictures” to illustrate the meaning of words.
 Draw attention to the writer’s selection of words in mentor texts used for minilessons
 Encourage students to use new and interesting words as they revise their own
writing.
 In mini-lessons, create charts that help students make connections to words
they want to use in their writing
 While conferring with students about their writing, help them substitute
synonyms to convey the precise meaning they intend.