Teaching Words and How They Work

"Research has shown vocabulary knowledge to be the best support for student comprehension of narrative and information texts. This text from an award-winning authority on teaching vocabulary and texts gives teachers new ways to think about and teach vocabulary by making small changes to their practices. It can be used with any reading program or materials. These adjustments will enhance practices with which teachers are already familiar, like using reading walls, and having conversations with student about words. They will greatly expand students‘ vocabulary and their ability to figure out on their own the meanings of new words that they encounter. This rich text provides the rationale and research for how to select and teach word families in new ways, and ends each chapter with practical classroom examples that show how teachers have implemented these changes to vocabulary instruction that will help student for the rest of their reading lives. It‘s like teaching students to fish instead of giving them a fish, giving them clusters of words, and new ways to see, understand, and add new words on their own"--