Building Vocabulary

Vocabulary is enormously important to children’s development, especially in reading. Research clearly indicates that children with larger vocabularies have higher school achievement in general   and higher reading achievement in particular. In fact, people with larger vocabularies even have higher IQs!

Fortunately, a child’s vocabulary is not predestined. Rather, parents and teachers can have a real impact on children’s vocabulary knowledge. Research shows things we can do that significantly increase children’s, and by doing so children’s reading comprehension will also improve.

Several of those we can implement with young children are;

READ TO THEM

Studies indicate that children do learn words from books read aloud to them. Most helpful will be reading aloud books and other materials (such as magazines or environmental print) that have some, but not too many, words that are new to children. Read-aloud of storybooks is important, but also important is read-aloud of other types of text, such as information book.

Some research even suggests that teachers and parents highlight vocabulary more when reading aloud information books than when reading aloud stories

GET THEM READING

It’s never too early to introduce independent reading. Whether it be the first steps of looking at picture books or sounding out the words children can also learn new words through reading independently.

Researchers estimate that 5–15% of all the words we learn we learn from. And indeed, children who read more tend to have richer vocabularies. So when we engage students in motivational activities to encourage reading, we are simultaneously improving their vocabularies.