Bill,
We are required to cover vocabulary but so far, I haven't been told
that I must use a certain text. Therefore, students and I gather
words from our social studies text, headline news stories, and put
together a word list. I like your cluster approach and will try that.
What I have done that seems to work is divide the words by parts of
speech. I am a nut about verbs so the list always contains mostly
verbs and those "verbs" used as other parts of speech (apprehend,
apprehensive, apprehension). This seems to help them in their grammar
and their own writing.
For next year, I ordered a vocab book from a series called "Vocabu-lit"
or some such thing (words in literature). Because to be totally
without a book makes parents and administrators crazy.
Any book recommendations?
Marcia Alessi
Los Angeles
On Apr 25, 2005, at 10:51 PM, William McCleary wrote:
> In my earlier years, I did a great deal of reading about vocabulary
> and cognitive psychology. As a teacher of English teachers, I was
> interested in breaking the profession of its fondness for assigning
> 20 unrelated words per week, with a test on Friday and total reliance
> on dictionary definitions. I urged teachers at least to group words
> in some way, such as by the word parts they had in common.
>
> Many colleagues recommended that teachers instead find their
> vocabulary lists in whatever their students were reading so that
> students could see the words in genuine contexts. However, the
> implausibility of students being able to pick up new vocabulary from
> a single usage, even when combined with the dictionary definition,
> led me to a modification of that idea. I suggested that teachers look
> for semantic clusters such as nautical words in a novel involving
> sailing or farming techniques in a story that involved farms. Such
> words were generally used several times and were related to each
> other. This is sort of like the network model. To demonstrate the
> need for a much richer view of a new word, I constructed a matrix of
> the many possible facets of a word's meaning. I got the matrix from
> somewhere in my reading of cognitive psychology. I would point out
> the need for multiple exposures in multiple contexts if students were
> to make new words their own.
>
> I would like to tell you that students agreed with the plausibility
> of these ideas and adopted them for use in their own classes, but I
> doubt it. They would go out to student teach and would encounter the
> traditional methods that they remembered from their own school days.
> It was so easy to do things that way. Besides, they didn't have
> enough background in language; they hadn't even taken Latin in high
> school.
>
> Sigh.
>
> Bill
>
>
>> Network models have been under development in theoretical
>> linguistics for about two decades now. They are found in both
>> cognitive/functional (anti-Chomsky) and formal (Chomskyan)
>> linguistic theories. Scholars in the former are Dick Hudson, Ron
>> Langacker, and Joan Bybee, and in the latter folks like Steve Pinker
>> (see his book "Words and Rules").
>>
>> I'll speak with regard to vocabulary only for the moment. The idea
>> is that our mental stock of roots, suffixes, prefixes, and other
>> memorized items is arranged in a huge network in our minds. Each
>> item consists of, first of all, a connection between its
>> pronunciation and its meaning. Then, each item is also connected to
>> many other items by virtue of similarities in form, meaning, or the
>> fact that the concepts occur together in experience. Both its
>> meaning and its pronunciation are connected to other items. So you
>> have a big network of items (like nodes in a network, or knots in a
>> net) connected to each other somehow (as rope in a net reaches from
>> knot to knot).
>>
>> Let's take an example: "ring", the jewelry item. We know how it is
>> pronounced; we also know it is a noun. Its basic meaning is the
>> round metal band worn on a finger, but this meaning is embedded in
>> something much richer: first, numerous kinds of rings (engagement,
>> friendship, papal, wedding, signet, etc.), and then, the contexts in
>> which these different types appear. Hearing the term "wedding ring"
>> can cause us, depending on the context, to call up rich information
>> about weddings and / or marriage. Hearing "papal ring" calls up a
>> very different domain of knowledge, probably including rituals like
>> kissing the Pope's ring, etc.
>>
>> You can think of the meaning of a single word as having layers: the
>> simplest layer is the characteristics that carry across most items
>> in the class (most rings, in this case). As we "zoom in" on the
>> category, we have the different types of rings. In order to
>> understand these types, we have to have rich "background" knowledge
>> of each domain: weddings, friendship, Popes (I put "background" in
>> quotes because many network theorists believe that the rich detail
>> of this knowledge is what defines the word; it is not merely
>> background).
>>
>> "Ring" shares its pronunciation with another word: the verb "to
>> ring", as what a bell does. Jewelry "ring" and bell "ring" are very
>> likely connected to each other because of this sameness. Various
>> studies show that people activate or subconsciously "notice"
>> ambiguous words, even when the context resolves the ambiguity. They
>> wouldn't do this unless the word they hear activates both meanings.
>> Another bit of evidence is a certain type of speech error: the
>> speaker retrieves, not the intended word, but a word from the same
>> meaning domain. Thus someone might say "aunt" instead of "cousin",
>> or "moose" instead of "caribou". People also often choose the word
>> from the wrong end of the scale they are talking about -- saying
>> "hot" for "cold" or "low" for "high".
>>
>> Speech errors would be random if there weren't psychological
>> connections between the intended words and the actual words. The
>> errors aren't random. People are not very likely to say "winesap"
>> when they mean "caribou".
>>
>>
>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>> Johanna Rubba Associate Professor, Linguistics
>> English Department, California Polytechnic State University
>> One Grand Avenue * San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
>> Tel. (805)-756-2184 * Fax: (805)-756-6374 * Dept. Phone. 756-2596
>> * E-mail: [log in to unmask] * Home page:
>> http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>>
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Marcia Alessi
Language Arts & Social Studies
Sixth Grade
St. Paul the Apostle School
Los Angeles, California
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