Direct Vocabulary Instruction

Teaching Semantic and Vocabulary Skills

Direct vocabulary instruction is another key facet of your word-level language interventions. This means you’re providing explicit instruction for individual words and word-learning strategies.

For me, this looks like studying individual words explictly and direclty including the word’s:

• Phonology – How does the word sound? Say it out loud. Break it apart syllable by syllable.
• Orthology – How is the word written? Read it. Spell it.
• Morphology – What word parts are in the word? Identify any root words, prefixes, or suffixes.
• Semantics – What does it mean? Define the word in child-friendly language that they can understand. Label and discuss the part of speech. Share similar or related words.
• Syntax – How can the word be used? Give several examples of the word in phrases and sentences. Elicit conversation about it.

Doing this ensures greater word learning and understanding (beyond surface level understanding of a word). Directly teaching these strategies to our students helps them build in-depth word knowledge.

Here’s the step-by-step process I follow with a new word (that incorporates each of the areas I listed above):

1 – Say the word out loud.

2 – Write the word.

3 – Count the syllables, identify rhyming words, or do phonemic awareness activities with the word (blending, segmenting, etc..).

3 – Activate background knowledge of the word. Assess current familiarly with the word.

4 – Explicity teach and discuss a child-friendly definition of the word.

5 – Discuss any affixes or morphological features in the word. Provide related words, or words in the same word family (like melt, melted, meld, mold, etc…).

6 – Describe real pictures using the target word (within sentence).

7 – Draw the word to help solidify the word’s meaning.

8 – Real the word in a sentence. Discuss it in context.

9 – Do conversation activities using the word. Ask and answer questions about it.

For ideas on how to choose vocabulary targets, you can learn more here: Words

Targeting words directly like this is a research-supported way to boost our student’s vocabulary skills. And it is also most effective when done in context! Read on for some ideas on how to do this process within contextualized, story, or themed units.