I thought this chapter was really interesting and it helped to address some questions I've had about the teaching of vocabulary. During my tutoring experience at Firestone, I noticed that a lot of students seemed to really struggle with comprehending texts because they didn't understand the vocabulary used. This was surprising to me because some of the words they struggled with seemed to be fairly simple words in my opinion. This taught me that I shouldn't just assume that students know something and I should always ask students what they are having trouble with so I can help them better. I agree with Jago's approach to teaching vocabulary because it isn't just rote memorization and it makes words relevant to the texts they are reading.
I really liked Jago's "personal vocabulary list" bookmarks. I think this is a great way to get students to realize what words they don't know and how they can learn them. I also liked how she used "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Julius Caesar" to not only teach vocabulary, but also to teach tone and focus on characterization. Furthermore, I also agreed with Jago's idea that vocabulary taught in classrooms should be relevant. I definitely agree with this. Students should learn words that they will likely see multiple times throughout different types of literature. Overall, I really like Jago's approach to vocabulary because it seems that it will really help students learn. Rote memorization and vocabulary tests are never effective and simply cause students more headaches than they need. I plan on incorporating many of Jago's ideas into my own classroom in the future.
I absolutely loved the personal vocabulary list! I think it was such a great idea to have kids choose the words that they do not know, instead of some random words chosen that will probably not be used in real lifre.
ReplyDeleteJulie, I agree that Jagos approaches to vocabulary were really relevant to students. I was pleasantly surprised to see that she is not an advocate of vocabulary tests, because since she seems to be so traditional with other things, I almost expected her to be a proponent for rote memorization and testing. I like what she said about their being different levels of knowing a word, and that we can't give tests on words that are still in level 1 for our students.
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