Teaching students content-area or discipline-specific vocabulary can be a challenge.
There are a variety of teaching methods that aid students in learning and comprehending vocabulary specific to subject areas, such as science and social studies.
According to studies in vocabulary by Peter Freebody and Richard Anderson, vocabulary instruction must be meaningful, manageable, and lasting (1981).
Meaningful - vocabulary must be retained in long-term memory; students must learn content area words specifically as they occur within that subject area (ex: when they study tornadoes in science, they must learn terms specific to tornadoes, such as supercell andvortex.
Manageable - vocabulary instruction must fit within subject-specific literature that is not too challenging or tedious (this may NOT include a textbook, which can often be too rich with extraneous information).
Lasting - students must develop strategies to carry their vocabulary acquisition across the disciplines in order to have a major impact on learning.
* Contextual Redefinition is a vocabulary acquisition concept defined by Baldwin, Bean, and Readence in their text, Content Area Literacy: An Integrated Approach. Although it is not the only instructional strategy for vocabulary in existence - there are countless methods out there to aid instruction in vocabulary - it appears to be solid and specific to the content areas, which tends to be an area of vocabulary that is severely lacking for students. Check out my Glogster below for more information on this strategy!
There are a variety of teaching methods that aid students in learning and comprehending vocabulary specific to subject areas, such as science and social studies.
According to studies in vocabulary by Peter Freebody and Richard Anderson, vocabulary instruction must be meaningful, manageable, and lasting (1981).
* Contextual Redefinition is a vocabulary acquisition concept defined by Baldwin, Bean, and Readence in their text, Content Area Literacy: An Integrated Approach. Although it is not the only instructional strategy for vocabulary in existence - there are countless methods out there to aid instruction in vocabulary - it appears to be solid and specific to the content areas, which tends to be an area of vocabulary that is severely lacking for students. Check out my Glogster below for more information on this strategy!
http://rachnewm85.edu.glogster.com/contextual-redefinition-in-content-area-vocab/