Accessible Vocabulary
Overview
When teachers incorporate challenging but accessible Vocabulary words in their daily instruction, they create a contextual environment for students to practice, apply, and grow their Vocabulary knowledge.
Example: Use This Strategy In in the Classroom
Design It into Your Product
Use It in the Classroom
Watch how this first grade teacher models Vocabulary in her instruction in addition to using an interactive word wall. By slowing her speech and adding hand gestures, she highlights complex Vocabulary and provides the opportunity for students to try to incorporate them into their own language.
Design It into Your Product
See how Newsela provides texts at adaptive reading levels, which allows learners to read content that is interesting to them with Vocabulary that is accessible to them. Additionally, through their Power Words feature, high-frequency and high-utility words are highlighted within the articles, allowing learners to remember or reference their definitions in context.
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Teacher Modeling and Support Strategies
Teachers can support language development by using and providing syntax that is appropriately leveled (e.g. short, simple structure for young students).
Content that is provided in clear, short chunks helps students develop their Working Memory skills.
Maintaining consistent classroom routines and schedules ensures that students are able to predict what will happen next.
Teaching students how to label, identify, and manage emotions helps them learn self-regulation skills.
Attributing results to controllable aspects (strategy and effort) fosters students' beliefs in self.
Learning about students' cultures and connecting them to instructional practices helps all students feel like valued members of the community.
Overtly encouraging all students to ask when they have forgotten something creates a classroom that supports risk-taking and skill development.
By talking through their thinking at each step of a process, teachers can model what learning looks like.
Teachers sharing text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections models this schema building.
When teachers share their goals and the paths they take to achieve them, they demonstrate that learning involves effort, mistakes, and reflecting.
Talking with students about what they know about the topic of upcoming work helps activate their Background Knowledge or reveals gaps.
Reading aloud regularly exposes students to new and familiar vocabulary and texts.
Reading aloud books about skills children are learning provides another model for their development.
