What Works to Improve Vocabulary & Comprehension ?

In a recent article in Reading Research Quarterly, Rebecca Silverman, Jeffrey Harring, Brie Doyle, Marisa Mitchell, and Anna Meyer (University of Maryland/College Park) and Patrick Proctor (Boston College) report on their study of vocabulary and comprehension instruction in 33 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms (the schools were in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, were racially diverse, and 74 percent of students were eligible for free and reduced-price meals). By observing teachers during the school year and looking at students’ before-and-after assessment results, the researchers were able to see which teaching practices seemed to have the biggest impact on students’ literacy gains:

Vocabulary

-    Explicitly teaching definitions of words was associated with gains in vocabulary achievement.

-    Instruction that helped students see relations among words was also associated with vocabulary improvement, probably because it gives students leverage when they encounter new words.

-    Instruction devoted to syntax and morphology was also associated with vocabulary gains. “These findings suggest that if students are taught to break down words into meaningful word parts and to analyze how words are used in various syntactic contexts, they may be able to learn new words, improve language proficiency, and perhaps ultimately, use those skills to comprehend text,” say Silverman, Harring, Doyle, Mitchell, and Meyer.

-    The authors were surprised that getting students to think about words in different contexts was associated with negative effects on vocabulary achievement. They theorized this may have been because teachers weren’t handling these teaching moments well – for example, one teacher defined the word delivery and then talked about how she had ordered pizza the night before. The discussion veered into students’ favorite foods and the teacher never brought it back to the application of the word delivery in that context.

-    Instruction devoted to literal comprehension was associated with negative results in students’ vocabulary acquisition. Again, the authors believe this was because teachers were using low-level techniques with literal comprehension, mostly the Initiate/ Respond/Evaluate model in which the teacher asks a question, a student responds, and the teacher says whether it’s right or wrong and moves on – not more-effective techniques such as the who/what/when/where approach, guiding students to find answers to literary questions in texts.

Comprehension

-    Teachers’ attention to inferential comprehension – getting students thinking about what is implied in a passage – was associated with positive gains in student comprehension.

-    Instruction in comprehension strategies was associated with positive gains for bilingual students but not for monolinguals.

-    In general, however, bilingual students performed less well in vocabulary and comprehension than monolingual students, and the authors note that the teachers they observed did not do enough differentiating to help bilingual students – for example, using cognates, translation, gestures, pictures, and videos.

-    Instruction that targeted context clues, text elements, decoding, and fluency were not associated with gains or losses in comprehension or vocabulary achievement – probably because the researchers didn’t observe much instruction in these areas. It may also have been because teachers told students to “sound it out” or “read it with fluency” without giving detailed and explicit instruction on how to do each, and also because they weren’t giving differentiated instruction to students who needed help in these areas.

The study did not draw any clear conclusions on the relationship between students’ vocabulary and comprehension achievement, and the authors call for further research in that area. Attention to these instructional practices can easily be implemented in any K-12 classroom to assist with students acquisition of vocabulary and comprehension skills. 

“Teachers’ Instruction and Students’ Vocabulary and Comprehension: An Exploratory Study with English Monolingual and Spanish-English Bilingual Students in Grades 3-5” by Rebecca Silverman, Patrick Proctor, Jeffrey Harring, Brie Doyle, Marisa Mitchell, and Anna Meyer in Reading Research Quarterly, January/February/March 2014 (Vol. 49, #1, p. 31-55).