10 Do’s and Don’ts for Effective Vocabulary Instruction (Infograph)

The ability of language arts students to achieve their academic goals greatly depends on the strength of their vocabulary. Instructors should strive to ensure their students’ vocabularies are both wide and deep, stressing comprehension, variety and effective expression over rote memorization and arbitrary listings. This infographic provides two sets of guidelines on how to frame and approach vocabulary instruction to these students. Instructors should introduce words through repeated exposure, and provide students with various contexts. The infographic details multiple learning tools to approach learning in the classroom and during student’s independent studies. Reading aloud, engaging multiple sources, creating nonlinguistic representations and expressions of the word, and using context clues are some of the many effective strategies for increasing comprehension. On the other hand, some strategies for vocabulary learning should be avoided as they often prove ineffective. It’s important not to rely on rote memorization of long vocabulary lists. Don’t be afraid, as an instructor, to move beyond leveled vocabulary texts and venture into other sources such as children’s literature for new and exciting ways of putting words into context. A student gains more value from a few words for which they learn a great deal of context and utility than from a large selection of words with which they’ve made only a cursory, fleeting association.

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