How to Introduce Vocabulary Before Students Read
Thoughtful vocabulary instruction teaches strategies and eliminates barriers to reading instruction.
“If I want my students to succeed in reading in French, I need to teach them the same problem-solving skills I use as a reader”
As I prepared a reading assignment for my French class, my college age daughter shared some candid thoughts. “I always found reading in Spanish very very frustrating,” she told me. “The teacher would always give us a glossary at the top of the page with all the words we didn’t know. So you had to go back and forth and it made it hard to follow the main idea of the text. And, it didn’t really help me. If you come across something you want to read in real life,” she told me, “there’s no English glossary to tell you the words you don’t know. So I didn’t have any skills to decode the text. And sometimes I looked up every word, but I still didn’t really know what it said. Reading in Spanish made me feel stupid.”
Maggie’s critiques betray a fundamental lack of understanding of the reading process; good L2 readers do not laboriously look up every unknown word in a text! Her misconception is exactly what I worry about in my own reading instruction. How do I help kids be interested in the text and not hate it? How can I know whether they really understand the selection? How do I support them in handling all the unknown vocabulary they’ll inevitably encounter in a text? Throughout my career, I tried several techniques:
Have students translate the text into English
Provide a glossary with a list of unfamiliar vocabulary
Choose a ‘canned’ text with only words and structures my students already know
Give students a list of comprehension questions (in the target language or in English) to measure their understanding.
The big flaw in each of these techniques is that they’re not authentic; they don’t mirror the types of tasks a user of this language would do in real life. In fact, they can even be counterproductive by sending students the message that they have to understand every word, and that target language reading is a laborious struggle. I wasn’t teaching students the skills to deal with ambiguity or to build their vocabulary. I didn’t really like any of this. But, I didn’t know what else to do.
I began researching reading instruction (and you can read more about my journey in part 1 of this blog post). I learned that the first step in good reading instruction is to identify and articulate the strategies I use myself while reading. Often, these strategies come so naturally to us as good readers that we don’t even realize we’re using them. Our struggling students, on the other hand, may not be using any reading strategies at all.
I started thinking about what I do as a L2 reader when I encounter an unknown word. I realized I draw from an assortment of vocabulary strategies to help me handle new words. Sometimes I…
Look at the part of speech
Use the words around it to make a guess
Understand a more general term (like maybe I can tell it’s a type of seafood, or a gesture, even though I don’t know the specific word… and that’s good enough)
Hold the word as a ‘question’ in my mind and come back to it later
And … sometimes… I look it up. But only when I determine it’s really important to my comprehension.
If I want my students to succeed in reading French, I need to teach them the same problem-solving skills I use as a reader, while giving enough support to complete a reading assignment. I began doing two things:
Introducing key vocabulary in contextualized phrases
Giving students a task to complete related to that vocabulary.
These two elements are a key to effective vocabulary introduction within a text. Over time, I’ve developed some practical techniques to accomplish those goals; Vocabulary Museum and Category Crunch. I’ve found these non-traditional techniques help students learn not only the specific vocabulary they need for a text, they teach techniques for handling unknown words with confidence and accuracy.
Vocabulary Museum
Before giving students a new text, make a list of 8-10 important phrases they will encounter in that reading. For example, in the story “Petit Nicolas: Le Chouette Bouquet”, I identified these challenging phrases (with English translations for blog readers, but not for students!)
Faire une partie de billes (To play a game of marbles)
J’ai choisi les fleurs le moins écrasées (I chose the least smashed flowers)
Je lui ai envoyé les fleurs à la figure (I shoved the flowers in his face)
Elles sont tombées sur le toit d’une auto (They landed on the roof of a car)
Il me ramenait une fleur qui était tombée du toit de l’auto (He brought me back a flower that had fallen off the roof of the car)
J’avais comme une grosse boule dans la gorge (It felt like I had a big lump in my throat)
Ma fleur était toute chiffonnée (My flower was completely shredded)
Quand je ramène mon carnet de classe a la maison avec des zéros dedans (When I bring my progress report home with a lot of zeros inside)
Give each student one phrase in the target language. After students figure out what their phrase means, they should draw a picture to illustrate it. Hang these completed illustrations around the classroom in a ‘gallery walk’ format.
Once the gallery walk is ready, give every student a list of all the phrases. Students should circulate around the classroom and match each illustration to the correct phrase.
This is an effective way to introduce the vocabulary students will encounter in the story because:
It provides some context for vocabulary
It provides multiple exposures to the new words
It requires students to use strategies to understand new vocabulary, including building on known words, considering the grammatical context (such as parts of speech), and elimination.
Students can collaborate with each other, sharing their thinking as they complete the vocabulary museum activity.
As students’ understanding of the vocabulary develops, they may start to hypothesize about what they will be reading about. This is good! It serves as an advanced organizer, gets students to start asking questions about the text, and sparks some interest or enthusiasm for what they’re about to read. In fact, you can add a question at the bottom of the vocabulary museum asking “What do you think this story / article will be about?”
Some tips for implementation:
It’s fine to give the same phrase to multiple students. Or, have students complete their drawings in pairs.
Include some context for students to build on current knowledge. “My flower was completely shredded” is a better phrase than just “shredded”. This mirrors the way language learners acquire vocabulary in real life.
Circulate around as students complete their drawings to be sure they’re on track.
I do allow students to look up a word during the drawing phase, but they may not use a translator during the museum phase.
Mistakes are OK!
In addition to all these instructional benefits, Vocabulary Museum is interactive and introduces movement into your lesson. (another powerful instructional practice!)
Category Crunch
Provide students a list of 15-20 challenging phrases they will encounter as they read. Ask them to organize the phrases into four categories without using a translator. For example, in the Petit Nicolas story “Un Souvenir Qu’on Va Chérir”, I gave students these challenging words (listed only in English for simplicity.
Clean
With neat hairdos
Dressed like a martian
The teacher’s pet
To punch in the stomach
I had gel in my hair
Arranged in three rows
To be unbearable
Sitting on the ground
To grab by the ear
To seem happy
To be standing beside the teacher
We got a bit dirty
We were all wet
Organize these phrases into the following categories:
“Our struggling students may not be using any reading strategies at all.”
Physical appearance
Physical position
Actions
Other vocabulary
This activity introduces not only vocabulary, but also the strategies students need to handle unknown words.
In organizing their lists, students must employ a lot of vocabulary strategies; they will build on known words, use cognates, look at parts of speech, and wrestle with ambiguity.
Students will begin to identify patterns that will occur in the story. In this story, for example, there are a lot of details about physical placement.
Students will begin to connect general with more specific terms. “We were clean with neat hairdos and I had gel in my hair” are all describing attractive physical appearance; knowing this is enough. The reader can continue with the story if they understand the gist of these phrases. There’s no need to get hung up on unknown words like ‘hair gel’ and ‘neat hairdos’.
During the Category Crunch activity, students still may not have figured out every unknown word, and that’s OK. First point them to their classmates for help. Once students have spent time with the vocabulary and collaborated with classmates, allow them to look up the handful of unknown words. This approach teaches appropriate dictionary use; for an occasional important word, after other vocab strategies are exhausted.
Also, students may disagree on where a word should be placed; this is also fine. Discuss the vocabulary placement as a class and focus on the reasons and strategies used to place each word. The important part is the process, and it’s possible a word may have more than one acceptable placement.
Finally, before introducing the reading, have students write a sentence predicting what the story will be about. This provides an advanced organizer, helps students begin asking questions about the reading, and provides some motivation to read as your burgeoning readers will be curious to know if their predictions are accurate!
Click to read about Authentic Vocabulary Instruction
For more ideas about teaching vocabulary, read my blog posts on Authentic Vocabulary Instruction!
Remember my daughter’s negative attitude toward reading in Spanish? I’m happy to report that today, at age 19, she is an intermediate speaker who reads and practices Spanish almost every day. She gives me hope as a language teacher! To learn why, read part 4 of this blog post: helping students read longer target language texts.
