Summary of Secondary Students with Learning Disabilities in Reading: Vocabulary Development
Vocabulary is an important building tool of a child’s reading skills. Students have to understand what the words mean in order to comprehend the story as it is presented to them in the classroom.
Unfortunately, that skill is rather ignored in middle school and is expected to be taught in elementary school. When those students do not grasp the concept in elementary and are pushed through to the middle school without the skill, they fall behind their classmates. With the reading skills for vocabulary lacking, these children are usually labeled with ‘learning disabilities’. All too often students read a passage and skip over the words that they do not understand. However, vocabulary skills in reading are essential to not only in the reading classroom, but in all the content area classrooms as well.
Vocabulary development should give the students the ability to learn the meaning of new words and concepts that are presented to them in their text. Learning this skill will help students with comprehension and their content area curriculum. By teaching students vocabulary development, students will have a reserve of new words, connect new words with their previous knowledge, gain the ability to understand and comprehend the text, and lastly, it will increase a students’ word knowledge to connect with their comprehension and success.
To accomplish vocabulary development, before reading the teacher needs to instruct their students on any prerequisites that they need to understand to interpret the text appropriately. This means the teacher has to pull out the most important words as well as those that may be too difficult for the stud...
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...ents to make a good reader. Therefore, without a certain piece of reading students skills the scaffolding is unstable. Due to a student’s faulty scaffolding, reading does not work cohesive to make the end product a successfully understood story. This concerns me. If I feel like they are falling behind on these skills and their other teachers, my colleagues, are not teaching them these skills, I will and do my best at making it appropriate for my class. Without reading skills, they will be faced with horrible ramifications from their problems to comprehend and understand the vocabulary words they see in their textbooks.
Works Cited
Diane Pedrotty Bryant, J. E. (2001). Iris. Retrieved April 1, 2011, from Secondary Students with Learning Disabilities in Reading" Vocanulary Development: http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/infoBriefs_local/cld/cld_vocabulary
From the Glass Castle, Jeannette’s mother read picture books with Jeannette and her siblings in their early childhood. This activity established good reading habits for Jeannette and her siblings. When she was older, after dinner, her father read the dictionary with the kids, looked up the words they did not know, and discussed the definitions (Walls 56). Because of the reading habits her parents gave her, every time Jeannette did not understand a word, she looked up the word in the dictionary. The routine of reading dictionary after dinner and the habit of looking up an unknown word in the dictionary helped Jeannette build up her vocabulary. With abundant vocabulary and excellent reading skills, Jeannette did not have problem with her college admission test. Studies show that having good reading habits not only increase the volume of children’s vocabulary but also help them perform well on their exams. In the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Policy Information Center 's report, The Family: America 's Smallest School, the author points out the importance of reading to children:
Karen Bromley (2014) in the chapter “Active Engagement with Words” begins with the harsh reality of students who cannot “read well enough to be successful” (120). She acknowledges that a large vocabulary is key to successful reading due to a number of factors, including: it boosts comprehension, improves achievement, enhances thinking and communication, and promotes fluency (121). Therefore, Bromley advocates that educators equip students with strategies for tackling words, strategies that actively engage students and begin with teacher modeling (direct-instruction). Bromley discusses the three tiers of word types, pointing out that tiers two and three (multisyllabic) cause the most problems for adolescent readers. To approach these words students need attention to the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects, the literal elements (spelling, pronunciation, graphics, meaning, and grammatical function) and then the more inferential and contextual aspects (visual, auditory, or sensory image that connects to the word, for example). Active engagement, the use of metacognitive strategies, is advocated by Bromley because it relies on students’ own knowledge and equips them with strategies they can use on their own when they encounter unfamiliar words. Such strategies covered in this chapter include: KWL (Know, Want to know, Learn), Teach-Teach-Trade, A Word A Day (www.wordsmith.org/words), Root Words, and Digital
The child’s lexical inventory is well developed. She has no troubles with finding words to express her thoughts. Not many words are repeated and that illustrates that she has a vast vocabulary to where she does not have to borrow words. She does not over or under extend the usage of her words.
The causes of reading difficulties often arise because of learning disabilities such as dyslexia, poor preparation before entering school, no value for literacy, low school attendance, insufficient reading instruction, and/or even the way students were taught to read in the early grades. The struggles that students “encounter in school can be seen as socially constructed-by the ways in which schools are organized and scheduled, by assumptions that are made about home life and school abilities, by a curriculum that is often devoid of connections to students’ lives, and by text that may be too difficult for students to read” (Hinchman, and Sheridan-Thomas166). Whatever the reason for the existence of the reading problem initially, by “the time a [student] is in the intermediate grades, there is good evidence that he will show continued reading g...
Students have the ability to read grade level text but continue to demonstrate difficulty with comprehension of information because they are unfamiliar with the vocabulary of learning. This problem appears to occur more frequently in English learners (EL) and Students with Disabilities (SWDs). Students benefit from specific and explicit vocabulary instruction (Hattie 2000).... ... middle of paper ...
This is addressed through the idea of the Matthew Effect, which is applied to vocabulary instruction through SES groups. Beck and Mckeown shed light on the problems associated with teaching vocabulary and propose a change, which will undoubtedly help struggling students. The teacher’s responsibility is to instill a curiosity and love for words in his/her students. Reading through the article, it became evident that in order to know a word you must be able to apply it in different situations. As stated in the article “Simply put, knowing a word is not an all-or-nothing proposition: It is not the case that one either knows or does not know a word (9).” The authors propose a theory that student’s knowledge of vocabulary words lies on a continuum. This ranges from limited knowledge, narrow knowledge and finally a rich understanding of the word and use of it in context. Overall, the article has made it evident that direct instruction is correlated with student achievement in the classroom.
To provide support to the children to developed and use the key vocabulary I will do repetition. Reading storybooks that have the vocabulary, the word
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