Developing vocabulary through drama

It has been a busy week for us.

We are thrilled that Susan was honored by the New Jersey Council of Teachers of English (NJCTE) as Educator of the Year. She accepted the award at the annual NJCTE conference at Montclair State University this weekend, where she also presented some of our new work on The Great Gatsby in a session entitled, “Teaching Gatsby in the Age of Trump.” We are excited to be finishing the volume from which this work is drawn, Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby and look forward to its publication as the fourth in our series with Roman and Littlefield.

Meanwhile, Audrey travelled to Amsterdam with NJCU graduate student Tatiana Reyes who was presenting at “Look Both Ways: Narrative and Metaphor in Education” at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. While at the conference, Audrey attended a fascinating session presented by Jackie Winsch, “A stage for racial justice: Empowering youth through integrated drama education.”

Winsch’s focus was vocabulary development through drama. Her focus was the elementary classroom, but one of the activities she discussed could be easily implemented in the secondary classroom and fruitfully added to a teacher’s toolkit for addressing challenging vocabulary in informational text.

For the activity, the students sit in a circle and the teacher stands in the middle. The teacher narrates a story, and as she does, she calls students into the circle, one, two, or three at a time. Students are asked to engage in a kind of narrative pantomime: to act out pieces of the teacher’s story (in Winsch’s example the students were princesses and a beast) with facial expressions and physical actions (sometimes prompted by the teacher). They might also be asked to repeat bits of dialogue (the beast said, “I am hungry,” so the student as beast repeats, “I am hungry”). Each time the teacher wished to dismiss certain students from the center, she would “whoosh” them out, and then beckon other students in.

The key to this activity, for our purposes, was the inclusion of several key vocabulary words into this narrated drama. Students were physically acting out and sometimes repeating dialogue that included targeted words. In a fun, interactive manner, students were hearing and using the key words, all in an engaging narrative context. In other words, this was a teacher-led version of the vocabulary skits we love.

This activity could easily be implemented in a secondary classroom. In Winsch’s example, the teacher had created the narrative and led the activity, and secondary teachers could do the same. But students could also write and then implement their own narratives, leading their peers in a brief and simple narrated skit. As with the vocabulary skits we advocate in our UsingInformational Text series, these skits could be on any topic (Winsch’s were intended to allow students to explore gender norms) but could also foreground the content of the upcoming informational text (a skit about table manners and gender norms for clothing in preparation for reading an excerpt from Lillian Eichler’s 1921 Book of Etiquette which we offer in Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird to stimulate discussion of gender in To Kill a Mockingbird).

The brilliance of this activity is that it gets students out of their seats, acting and thinking creatively, embodying and using new words. All of this enhances their necessary “massive practice” so that they can own these new words and engage any challenging reading with confidence.

Jackie Winsch used this activity to argue for integrating drama and play into education. Play is such an important part of learning, and it should play a greater role in school generally, not just in the elementary grades.

In conclusion, then, given all that we know about how crucial complex vocabulary is in determining students’ success with informational text, this narrated vocabulary pantomime activity is one tool we hope all teachers add to their toolbox.

Using vocabulary instruction to support all learners

We were very excited yesterday to see our column, “Pairing Contemporary Nonfiction with Canonical Texts,” published in the March issue of English Journal. As we were looking over the table of contents and seeing what great company we are in, Meghan Liebfreund’s essay, “Facilitate Informational Text with Vocabulary Instruction” immediately caught our attention.

Though we have not encountered Liebfreund’s work before, we feel like we have discovered a kindred spirit. Noting the growing emphasis on informational text, she calls vocabulary instruction “crucial” to student success in comprehending it. She cites her recent study that showed “vocabulary knowledge” to be “the strongest predictor of informational text comprehension for readers in grades 3 through 5, and its influence was nearly two times larger than decoding efficiency and prior knowledge” (77).

We also wholeheartedly agree with Liebfreund that “it is vital that we provide instruction that is engaging and effective when supporting students’ vocabulary development .... [and that] enhancing vocabulary instruction often requires the implementation of several instructional strategies.” And, like Liebfreund, we advocate following the model presented by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan in Bringing Words to Life: selecting a reasonable number of “important and frequently used words,” having students interact with the words in meaningful contexts that also front-load concepts that are key to the reading, making instruction explicit, and providing ample and varied practice with the words.

The types of pre-reading vocabulary exercises we include in our model for teaching informational text also follow the criteria Liebfreund calls for, such as the explicit teaching of word forms and drawing students’attention to the multiple meanings of common words. We also believe that “[w]ord learning should be a social process that involves students talking about and sharing what they know and are learning about words” (77).

Finally, Liebfreund’s piece echoes the belief we recently blogged about: that all learners can succeed with complex informational text if given sufficient support. We know that if we make the effort to give that support, especially around the challenge of vocabulary, we create an environment where all students can succeed.

Vocabulary instruction needs to be authentic

Vocabulary instruction is both super challenging and super important and is receiving more and more attention as a result of the Common Core (see for example, the recent “Under Common Core, Students Learn Words by Learning about the World” in Education Week). Because complex informational texts often include masses of unfamiliar domain-specific vocabulary, working with this kind of text in the language arts classroom highlights both the challenges and the importance of careful, regular, and engaging vocabulary instruction.

How can we introduce complex informational text into our classrooms without overwhelming our students with extensive unfamiliar and intimidating vocabulary?

For example, when Audrey was working with Loving v. Virginia in a class studying the Supreme Court decision in relation to the issue of interracial love and marriage in To Kill a Mockingbird (specifically, Dolphus Raymond), the students faced any number of vocabulary hurdles: statute, appellant, indictment, constitutional, due process, and statutory scheme, to name just a few.

If we don’t solve the vocabulary hurdle before getting into this text, reading the Loving case will be impossible; students will turn off and the connections with Mockingbird will remain inaccessible.

But a list of words and access to a dictionary is not the answer! Nor is the practice of copying and recopying new words. It’s using the words, over and over, in the kind of “massive practice” that James Moffett extols or what the National Reading Panel calls “systematic repetition.”

In a recent article in Educational Leadership, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey address the importance of “rigorous, engaging vocabulary instruction … [which] is especially important for culturally diverse students, who frequently find it challenging to master the academic language needed for school success.” Fisher and Frey emphasize the importance of “authentic use of content vocabulary.”

What is “authentic use”?

It’s when students (and teachers, but mostly students) use the new words over and over again in their own ways. The practice takes time and involves many mistakes and many misuses of the new words along the way. Teachers are there to nudge and correct and reshape students’ language use through a mix of vocabulary-in-context instruction and direct instruction. We need to offer lively and engaging collaborative work in vocabulary skits; context-clue questions that treat students like word detectives; and authentic, open-ended vocabulary questions that require students to own the new words.

Through “authentic use,” we produce learners who have gained new words in their lexicon as well as confidence about their own decoding and word acquisition skills.

This time and effort over vocabulary will pay dividends in our classrooms when we turn to our informational text(s) and in our students’ lives as they meet the challenges of new vocabulary in and outside of the language arts classroom.

Tackling Vocabulary in Informational Text -- Part 3: Vocabulary Skits

In our last two posts, we talked about vocabulary activities that can help break down new vocabulary words for students so that when they encounter engaging but challenging informational text they are prepared to succeed.   

Vocabulary Skits

In our last blog on this topic, we turn to our favorite vocabulary activity, vocabulary skits, which incorporate the work of our previous activities (using context clues, dictionary definitions, and word forms), but in a way that is interactive, fun, and creative. 

The activity is short and simple. Give each group of students a prepared slip with the word, the definition of the word, some model sentences using the word, and a scenario in which they will need to use the word. Give them a few minutes (not too many) in which to prepare their skit, and then ask them to perform it for the class.

Below is a sample from our unit (available for free to view and download at www.usinginformationaltext.com) that puts an excerpt on rabies from a 1915 farm manual into dialogue with chapter 10 of To Kill a Mockingbird.

sullen – irritated, gloomy, morose, sluggish

• I do not advise addressing the principal in a sullen tone.

• The children were sullen and short-tempered after waiting in a long line in the hot sun.

• Parents often describe their teenage children as sullen and uncommunicative, but, sometimes, young adults want their space and privacy.

Scenario: Because of a recent flood in the school gymnasium, the school dance has been cancelled. The students are understandably upset, and their behavior in class is sullen. Create a skit in which the English teacher tries to engage her sullen students and ask them to talk about their feelings. Many of the students remain sullen.

The only rule for this activity is that each student in the group must use the vocabulary word at least once. Notice that for these, we provide both definitions and several model sentences as well as the skit scenario. We want the work of this activity to center around using the word (and circulating around the groups as they prepare their skits is still crucial to insure optimal student success). The big payoff for this activity is that in rehearsing their skit, the students in the group will be using the vocabulary word numerous times. And as their classmates watch the performances, they will also see the word in use several times. 

Vocabulary work is inherently difficult. Students need “massive practice” (Moffett) to make new words their own, but that practice doesn’t need to be tedious. And with this sort of set-up, students will be ready to take on the challenges of any informational text!

Stay tuned for our next post on how we recently shared some of these activities and an informational text with a 9th grade class.

Tackling Vocabulary in Informational Text -- Part 2: Word Forms and Dictionary Skills

In our last blog, we talked about the particular challenge dense vocabulary poses to students engaging with informational text. We talked about ways to prime the vocabulary pump so that students are not immediately turned off by the informational text. 

We began with some sample vocabulary questions that focus on using context clues, in part because these questions highlight what students know rather than what they don’t. With that warm up in place, we can move on to more challenging words and vocabulary practice.

Word Forms and Dictionary Skills

The CCSS emphasize awareness of word forms as well as dictionary skills. On the latter, remember that no one is born knowing how to the use the dictionary! And with the wealth of online resources only a smartphone away, we live in a world rich with word resources. But simply sending students to the dictionary to find the definition of a word is a recipe for disaster. How will they know which definition to choose? How will they make sense out of the definition without context?

We suggest students practice their dictionary skills by using sources to determine the uncommon meaning of common words. Below is a sample from our unit (available for free to view and download at www.usinginformationaltext.com) that puts an excerpt on rabies from a 1915 farm manual into dialogue with chapter 10 of To Kill a Mockingbird:

During the time of Mockingbird, a maid might be referred to as a domestic. And you can find a lot of discussion in the domestic news about what is going on in our country. But when Craig references rabies in “domestic animals and man,” he is using domestic in a different way. What is a domestic animal? Can you see any relationship between the different meanings of the word domestic?

This level of dictionary work will better prepare students to use word sources generally (and to find the particular sources they like best).  

Then, students can move on to more challenging questions that require source work. Below, the question asks the students to look up the word “emaciated,” but the answer requires the students to go beyond just knowing the definition.

The cat was emaciated. The veterinarian could be expected to suggest more food or less? Why?

           

One of the most frustrating parts of vocabulary acquisition and instruction is the interval between knowing what a word means and knowing how to use it correctly. For this reason, and to reinforce context clues and word meanings in a low-stakes way, we suggest some practice with parts of speech and word endings. Be patient with your students. This is difficult.

At certain points in history, a thin physique has been considered disgusting, unhealthy, and a bad omen; during these periods, an _____ person was looked down upon.

a) emaciate

b) emaciated

c) emaciation

d) emaciates

             

The activities above will prepare students to read the informational text with a far greater level of comfort, but they will also help students move towards owning these new words and become more comfortable generally with the process of working with and understanding unfamiliar words. That, in the end, is our larger goal.

If you're starting to feel overwhelmed by -- and wondering when you'll find the time for -- all of these activities, fear not. We are by no means suggesting that you undertake all of these strategies all of the time. Pick the activities most relevant to your students' needs and your current instructional goals. 

But stay tuned for our next blog, in which we’ll discuss our favorite vocabulary activity – vocabulary skits – which are interactive, fun, and creative!

Tackling Vocabulary in Informational Text -- Part 1: Context Clues

Reading informational text offers a number of challenges to students. One of these challenges is dense, unfamiliar vocabulary. An otherwise engaging short reading that might be accessible to students in terms of style, syntax, and subject might have more than a dozen unfamiliar vocabulary words. And that can result in an instant turn-off

If on top of the vocabulary challenge, the text also assumes background knowledge that the students don’t have, we are looking at a Herculean teaching challenge.

All is not lost, however! We have some suggestions: 

• Pick important words that are crucial to understanding the reading.
• Use a mix of vocabulary activities.
• Allow students to be creative in their vocabulary work.
• Sneak ideas and information from the reading into your vocabulary work so that your students will be primed for the informational text.

 

Below, and in our next few posts, we will highlight some of our thinking about how to go about priming the vocabulary pump. The exercises are all taken from our unit (available for free to view and download at www.usinginformationaltext.com) that puts an excerpt on rabies from a 1915 farm manual into dialogue with chapter 10 of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Context Clues

Vocabulary activities that focus on using context clues are a great way to begin because they highlight what the students already know and can figure out rather making them feel bad about their vocabulary knowledge deficit. Some multiple-choice exercises (2) are fine, but mix in questions that ask for a higher level of engagement and response (1). And following the sample questions released by PARCC, ask your students to think carefully not just about the right answer but about what in the context helps us to determine the meaning of the word in question (3). That way we reward thinking and not guessing.

1) The passage indicates that to prevent the spread of rabies, all dogs should be muzzled. Since we have learned that the disease spreads when one animal bites another, we can infer that muzzling an animal prevents those bites. Using that understanding, what do you think a muzzle might be?

2) She has a pleasant and sunny disposition; it is a rare day when you see her with a frown on her face. Disposition here means

a) nature

b) ability

c) frown

d) unwilling

3) Which word from the sentence in question 2 best helps the reader to understand the meaning of disposition?

a) rare

b) day

c) she

d) pleasant

In our next blog, we’ll discuss using vocabulary activities that move beyond context clues and focus on awareness of word forms and on dictionary skills.