WHAT DOESN'T WORK WHILE TEACHING VOCABULARY 

There are a number of traditional teaching practices related to vocabulary that deserve to be left in the "instructional dustbin." The key weakness in all of these practices is the limited or rote interaction students have with the new word/concept. Let us quickly review the most common of these less effective approaches.

1.    Look them up. Certainly dictionaries have their place, especially during writing, but the act of looking up a word and copying a definition is not likely to result in vocabulary learning (especially if there are long lists of unrelated words to look up and for which to copy the definitions).

2.    Use them in a sentence. Writing sentences with new vocabulary AFTER some understanding of the word is helpful; however to assign this task before the study of word meaning is of little value.

3.    Use context. There is little research to suggest that context is a very reliable source of learning word meanings. Nagy found that students reading at grade level had about a one twentieth chance of learning the meaning of a word from context. This, of course, is not to say that context is unimportant but that students need a broader range of instructional guidance than the exhortation "Use context."

4.    Memorize definitions. Rote learning of word meanings is likely to results, at best, in the ability to parrot back what is not clearly understood.