How to make vocabulary stick

academicvocab If you teach students vocabulary, check out 101 Strategies to Make Academic Vocabulary Stick by Marilee Sprenger.

Let me identify a few of the strategies:

Create a chart marked noun, verb, adjective and adverb. Make sure students know what those parts of speech are. When you teach a new word, ask the students to write the word in the appropriate column. Then talk about different forms of the word. “Predict,” for example is a verb. But “prediction?” A noun. “Predictable?” An adjective. “Predictably?” An adverb.

You, the teacher, “wear” the new word on your person. Write the word on masking tape and tape it to yourself. Let students observe you walking around wearing the new word. Let them think about that word. Later, let students offer their thoughts about the word before you define it for them.

Teach students how to annotate their books or articles in order to learn new vocabulary words. For example, teach students to circle words they don’t know. Write the meaning in the margin. Now draw a line connecting the new word with the margin meaning. Or draw connecting lines between a new word and its synonym or antonym.

Act out a word, and let students guess what the word might be. This is a good way to reinforce synonyms too.

To teach prefixes and suffixes, create a graphic organizer with the affix in the center. Around it write four words using this affix. From each word, like spokes of a wheel, write the definition of the word. Still farther out on the spokes, write a sentence using the words properly.

To categorize shades of meaning, draw five squares next to each other, forming a “train.” Study five words (on the board or on sticky notes for each student or group). Using the squares, line up the five words in some kind of order (strongest to weakest, most informal to most formal, or most general to most specific, for example).

Use online dictionaries, but not just any online dictionaries. Lingro.com can offer students a definition every time they click on an online word they don’t know. Blachan.com/shali defines a word, tells its part of speech, and shows images from Flickr, Google and Yahoo. Wordhippo.com tells a word’s meaning, a synonym, an antonym, its pronunciation, and words which rhyme with it. Wordhippo translates words into other languages too. These dictionaries are great for English language learners.

These are just seven of the suggestions in 101 Strategies to Make Academic Vocabulary Stick. Further information about each strategy is available in the References section of the book, including the names of educators who “invented” the strategies and the research to back them up.

And you thought you were creative!