Reading Reflection 7: More Reading Stuff

Dear readers (all two of you),
Tierney and Readance's chapter on Meaning Vocabulary goes into great detail describing 7 strategies to promote students' vocabulary. The main idea is if a student is unfamiliar with words he or she encounters while reading, then he or she will not be able to read well. I agree with this statement, but I do not necessarily agree with the converse of the statement. There are many factors that can prevent a student from reading well. At any rate, the other main idea of this chapter is that good teachers are effective at teaching the relevant vocabulary to the topic they are teaching. This is true across the board in any subject at any level. The seven different strategies were possible sentences, list-group-label, contextual redefinition, feature analysis, world map, vocabulary self-collection, and Levin's keyword method. The authors go through and provide the purpose for using this strategy along with the rationale, the attended audience, a description of the steps to implement it, and any comments or concerns that accompany each one. Each of these strategies serves its own purpose, but I do not think that all of these are highly effective in my Algebra class such as Contextual Redefinition. Most math terms are note easily guessed from context; however, other strategies such as Feature Analysis most certainly have a place in a high school math class. I like the cognitive demand this strategy expects of the students. They must categorize all the new information in comparison to everything they have already learned. This will most certainly help students retain information and recall it when they need it. This is a vital skill to be good at math since math builds on itself. Now that I have read this chapter, I realize that vocabulary is much more important than I thought. In particular, the strategies used to teach vocabulary can also help my students remember the material better, and who would not love for that to happen?