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      Introduction

      Since the 1990s, teachers have begun to realize that “look it up in the dictionary” or “check the glossary” is not an appropriate response when students inquire about a word’s meaning. Thankfully, in most classrooms, the weekly lists of words to study for Friday quizzes have been replaced with vocabulary assignments that create better retention. Teachers know that their students need to learn and use more words than ever. Why have teachers come to this conclusion? Three factors have influenced most of the teachers with whom I work.

      First, the increasing rate of children living in poverty means that students arrive in prekindergarten or kindergarten programs already displaying a vocabulary deficit. The thirty-million-word gap, as it is known, refers to the number of words that students in welfare-dependent families have heard spoken versus the number of words that students in professional families have heard spoken before they enter school (Hart & Risley, 2003). This gap, if not addressed, is compounded over time and becomes a serious impediment to reading comprehension. Studies show that kindergarten vocabulary knowledge accurately predicts second-grade reading comprehension (Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 2002). Anne E. Cunningham and Keith E. Stanovich’s (1997) work shows a correlation between first-grade vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in high school. Thus, boosting our economically disadvantaged students’ vocabulary is incredibly important because they have an early and huge disadvantage that impacts their achievement through their teenage years. (And, ethically, boosting every student’s vocabulary should be part of each school’s mission.)

      Second, academic standards have increased in rigor, and they demand that students have large, general academic vocabularies in addition to advanced, discipline-specific vocabularies. The United States and other nations’ adopted standards have been crafted with attention to the workings of our global economy. It’s simply no longer possible for the masses in most countries to get a good factory or office job with attractive benefits and comfortable pensions upon leaving secondary school. The world has changed a great deal since the 1960s, and the best jobs now require high levels of literacy and numeracy in addition to nonacademic skills like effective collaboration and technological savvy. Teachers feel pressed for time, as they always have, but they also know that the high level of literacy needed for success in academia and in the workplace requires more attention to vocabulary.

      And third, teachers know that students with rich vocabularies do better in many facets of life. Reading comprehension is definitely tied to the strength and size of one’s vocabulary, as mentioned previously. Oral expression, which factors greatly into first impressions, is highly dependent on a person’s vocabulary. A first impression is often critical to a student’s success—for example, a college or job interview depends on making a good first impression. Teachers also know that as students progress through school, the demands in each subject area increase. Those content-area demands require a deep understanding of hundreds of words. Our students, many of whom have been subjected to years of multiple-choice testing of reading and vocabulary, must be reconditioned to learn words not only at a recognition level or with answers from which to choose but also at a deep level for application in speaking and writing.

The Teacher’s Perspective

      I understand the concerns that teachers have about the size and strength of their students’ vocabularies. When I was a full-time classroom teacher, my concerns were mainly about the actual words I should teach explicitly because they were vital to understanding content, and how to best encourage incidental or self-directed vocabulary learning. These areas of concern seem to resonate with the hundreds of teachers I’ve worked with to improve vocabulary instruction as well.

      I also understand that teachers have doubts about the words their instructional materials target for instruction. When I was teaching short stories, essays, drama, and poetry, I questioned the words my literature textbook emphasized. Sometimes I thought, “Who in the world selected these words?” Archaic terms, words used metaphorically, and lists of words to study for the ACT and SAT often seemed so disconnected from what I felt my students needed to know right then for academic success.

      My doubts were validated when, as a high school English teacher, I discovered that my students lacked a knowledge of words that I assumed they knew well. For example, I was surprised once when my students, who knew the word summary and had actually written summaries in my class, couldn’t tell me what the word summarize meant. This moment, in the first class of the day, allowed me to check with all my students later in the day about their knowledge of inflectional endings. I remember being fairly shocked that ninth graders didn’t know the ending -ize is used with verbs. (Thus, summarize often means “to write a summary”). Upon further probing, I discovered the majority of them didn’t know that -er or -or in a noun often signifies

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