This chapter addressed a problem that I believe many of us will see as teachers—students with poor vocabularies. I think that this is going to be one of the biggest hurdles that we will see when teaching high school students. This is especially true for students who are struggling readers. One of my fears is how to get struggling readers through the classics that we have to teach. Jago says, “for reasonable reading comprehension a student needs to know 90-95 percent of the words” (22). This seems like a lot. If they can’t understand even the words on the page, how are they supposed to understand anything else that the literature has to offer?
Chapter three shed a little bit of light on this for me. Jago has some really good ideas for building students’ vocabulary while reading classics. One of the ideas that I really liked was the vocabulary bookmarks. These are nice because students can pick out words that they personally don’t understand. It also gets them to actively read and not pass over words they don’t know without thinking about them like I have seen many students do.
Another thing that I liked about this chapter was how Jago picked a few strong key words from the text her students were reading, in this case Julius Caesar. She chooses words that will benefit the students and teaches them in depth what they mean as well as teaching the literature. I thought this was a great idea because she really got the students using the words, which is the only way that they will actually remember it.
I agree that this will probably be one of the biggest hurtles. We did vocab books in high school, but they were definitely not as helpful as the suggestions Jago makes in the text. The students become much more critical of a text when they fully understand the meanings of the words used in the text. I would like to have a lot of activities centered around word usage and meaning. I think it is one of the things the students will take with them through college and into their future jobs.
ReplyDeleteI noticed many students mentioned how their FHS student struggled with vocabulary. I think this is a common problem - but a serious issue since students rely on vocabulary to read/understand text.
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