Learning Words Inside and
Out: Creating a School-Wide
Vocabulary Initiative
Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey
San Diego State University
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2008). Word wise and content rich: Five essential steps to teaching academic
vocabulary. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
How Often Has This Occurred?
In a U.S. History class, the teacher says,“Look
up these vocabulary words and write a
sentence using the word.”
• Appeal (n): attractiveness that interests,
pleases, or stimulates
Shawna appeal to me from her good
looks.
Vocabulary Goes
to College
• 165 college freshmen enrolled in a remedial reading
course found that vocabulary was the only significant
variable to make a statistically significant contribution
to measures of literal and critical reading
comprehension, evaluation, and appreciation of
reading materials (Farley & Elmore, 1992)
• Those with lower vocabulary scores were less likely
to challenge information in passages (Baker, 1985)
• Less-skilled readers make limited use of context and
over-generalize passages to try to explain the
meaning of unknown words (McKeown, 1985)
Learning Vocabulary?
Both high- and low-achieving college
freshmen readers:
• Used only rote memorization to learn
vocabulary
• Didn’t see why it was necessary
• Scored poorly on using vocabulary in
writing (Francis & Simpson, 2003)
The Numbers Game
• Need to know 88,500 word families by
ninth grade (Nagy & Anderson, 1984)
= 500,000 words TOO MANY! Let’s cut it
in half
= 250,000 words  1620 days (K-8, never
absent)
= 154 words per day! How are you doing?
Barriers to Vocabulary
Development in Secondary
• Schedules require conceptual shifts every 50-90
minutes
• 4-8 teachers a day who use different methods and
devote different amounts of time to vocabulary
• Schools that operate within, but not across
departments
• Content area teachers who know their vocabulary,
but not effective ways to develop it
• Belief that vocabulary is the English department’s job
An Intentional Vocabulary Initiative
• Make it intentional through word selection
and intentional instruction.
• Make it transparent through teacher modeling
of word-solving and word learning.
• Make it useable with collaborative learning.
• Make it personal by fostering student
ownership.
• Make it a priority with schoolwide practices.
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2008). Word wise and content rich: Five essential steps to teaching academic vocabulary.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Step 1: Make it Intentional:
Selecting Words
Influence of Background
Knowledge
Catherine the Great, a minor aristocrat from
Germany, became Empress of Russia when
her husband Peter, the grandson of Peter the
Great, was killed.
Types of Vocabulary
• Tier 1/General
– Commonplace; learned from interactions
with texts and people
• Tier 2/Specialized
– Change meaning with context
(“polysemic”)
• Tier 3/Technical
– Specific to the discipline
A starting point for selecting vocabulary
The Problem: Too Many
Words!
• 17 words identified in 2 paragraphs
• Ideal is 8-10 a week for deep teaching
(Scott, Jamieson-Noel, and Asselin,
2003)
• Must be narrowed, but how?
Questions for Selecting
Vocabulary
• Is it critical to understanding?
• Will it be used again?
• Is it needed for discussions or
writing?
• Can they use context to figure it
4. Contextual
out?
Analysis
5. Structural Analysis • Can they use structure?
• Have I exceeded the number they
6. Cognitive Load
can learn?
1. Representative
2. Repeatability
3. Transportable
Adapted from Graves, 2006; Nagy, 1988; Marzano & Pickering, 2005
Using Word Lists to Identify
Vocabulary
• Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000)
– 570 headwords from textbooks
• Ogden’s Basic English Word List
– Dreamed of a “universal language”
– 850 phonetically regular words
• Word Part Lists
– Focus on prefixes, derivations
– Do you know what saggital means? How do you
know?
Step 2: Make it
Transparent: Modeling
Teacher Modeling
• Brief (5-10 minutes) thinkalouds
• Identify unfamiliar words to
learn procedures for
discerning meaning
• Show students how to look
inside (morphology and
structure) and outside
(context clues and
resources) words
Morphology and Word Parts
•
•
•
•
•
Affixes
Root words
Derivations
Cognates for English learners
Beware of false cognates!
(embarrassed/embarazada)
But Context Isn’t
Always Enough…
The documentary film March of the Penguins was a surprise hit
in 2005. However, the movie neglected to point out that the
population of emperor penguins is thinning.
Since the 1970s, the penguins’ neighborhood has become
increasingly warm. The Southern Ocean experiences natural
shifts in weather from one decade to the next, but this warm
spell has continued, causing the thinning of sea ice. Less sea
ice means fewer krill, the penguins’ main food source. Also,
the weakened ice is more likely to break apart and drift out to
sea, carrying off the young penguin chicks, who often drown.
Is global warming responsibility for the thinning of penguin
population? Scientists believe so. (Gore, 2007, p. 94)
Think aloud to clear up confusions
about skinny penguins!
Resources
• Peer resources from
productive group work
• Dictionaries
• Bookmark Internet
resources
• Model how you use
these (Phone a Friend,
dictionary use on doc
camera)
Step 3: Make it Useable:
Collaborating with Peers
Oral Language and
Vocabulary
• Teacher talk dominates most classrooms
(Cazden, 2001)
• Middle school math students taught to use
heuristic vocabulary in discussions achieved
a higher levels (Koichu, Berman, & Moore,
2007)
• High school world language students who
constructed word maps with peers acquired
more vocabulary (Morin & Goebel, 2001)
Tips for Productive
Group Work
• Establish purpose (content, language,
and social goals)
• Variety is the spice of life
• Integrate activities into content flow
Fostering Collaboration
• Partner and small-group
discussions
• Jigsaws
• Student think-alouds
• Reciprocal teaching
• Co-constructed graphic
organizers
• Semantic feature
analysis
Step 4: Make it Personal:
Individual Activities
Challenges to
Independent Work
• 28% of high school teachers “often or
very often” run out of time in class and
assign the content for homework
(MetLife, 2008)
• Should follow modeling, guided
practice, and collaborative work with
peers (Fisher & Frey, 2008)
Independent Learning of
Vocabulary
• Integration of schema with a focus on
sets of relationships
• Repetition through repeated
opportunities to encounter words in
speech, reading, and writing
• Meaningful use of the words in
authentic events (Nagy, 1988)
Step 5: Make it a Priority:
Creating a Schoolwide
Focus
Why Go Schoolwide?
• Schoolwide focus is one of the most
important actions a middle or high school
can take to improve achievement
(Langer, 2001; Reeves, 2000)
• Focus on literacy schoolwide leads to
long-term improvement in climate,
achievement (Fisher, Frey, & Williams,
2002)
Two Schoolwide Initiatives
• Words of the Week
(WOW Words) to
focus on “SAT
words”
• Wide reading to
build background,
increase exposure,
and foster interest in
reading
Words of the Week
• Five words a week (Fid, Fi: to trust)
– Affidavit, confidant, defiant, fidelity, infidel
• Grouped by affix or derivation
• Departments propose words
• Goal is to build vocabulary and teach
patterns for unfamiliar words
• Introduced in English classes
Incidental Learning Through
Wide Reading
• Cumulative effect of reading: 60
minutes per day x 5 days a week=
2,250,000 words per year
• 2,250 words learned per year this way
(Mason, Stahl, Au, & Herman, 2003)
A bargain, considering that only 300500 words can be directly taught
each year
Who benefits? How?
• Text must be at
independent level (you can’t
learn from books you can’t
read)
• Older readers learn more
words than younger readers
• Stronger readers learn
more words than struggling
readers
• The words they are likely to
learn are those they know a
little bit about
8 Factors for SSR
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Access
Appeal
Environment
Encouragement
Staff training
Non-accountability
Follow-up activities
Distributed time to read
Pilgreen, J. (2000). The sustained silent reading handbook. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann
Independent Reading in
Content Classes
• Choice
• Relevance
• Differentiation
Lessons Learned:
Professional Growth
Sustaining the Effort
• Learn with and from colleagues
• Develop a professional library on vocabulary
development
• Ensure that classrooms have a a range of
resources
Learning Words
Inside and Outside
When our teaching is at its best, our
students take what they’ve learned
inside our classrooms to their outside
lives. Vocabulary doesn’t exist between
the school bells—it is carried with each
learner for the rest of their lives.