How to Select Vocabulary Words for ELL Literacy Instruction

So what we need to make sure of is the words that we're having the students read, whether we're having them read them at the word level, at the sentence level, at the paragraph level, really before you start your lesson, look at the words and think, "I wonder if the students know this word. I wonder if they have this word in their home language. I wonder if they know the multiple meanings of this word or words and how those words can be used in different contexts.” And so it's up to us to really do very well at selecting words. And I want to tell you a little bit, something about this. There's been much research and Isabelle Beck and her colleagues talk about Tier One words, Tier Two words, Tier Three words.

And when they describe that, they say Tier One words are basic, common, everyday words. Tier Two words are words that are very useful. They have high, what we call generalizability because they can be used across many contexts and Tier Three words are academic words, but they're very narrow in their usage, right? So when I think about a Tier One word and we think about, and I give the example of “run,” R-U-N, that's a Tier One word. That's a basic word. A Tier Two word might be something like, “content,” like I'm happy, I'm satisfied. And then maybe a Tier Three word would be something very specific like “electrolytes” or something like a “phoneme,” that's very specific. But when the researchers did this work, they said, "Focus on Tier Two, the academic words that have high generalizability." But as researchers with English learners and multilingual students, they write about us too, because what we're saying is think also about the common words that have multiple, multiple meanings.

And I just gave you the word run. So the student might know, "Hey, let's run,” right? “I'm on the run. I'm run down, right? Don't give me the runaround." He runs on and no about his new project.” I came up with 45 definitions of that word, “run.” So you see, oftentimes we get these basic words, but the basic words can also have high, high, high numbers of meanings. And Tier Two words, absolutely we want to work on words that are very generalizable, like that word “content” that can mean happy or satisfied, but make sure I can make sure as an English learner that I'm pronouncing it correctly, I went to a classroom and they said, "The little boy is content, the content boy." So just think about the difference between “content” and “content.” Words look the same, spelled the same, different meanings, different pronunciations because the stress changed. Those little things make such a difference to a student who's learning English as an additional language.

So we have to pay attention to that. And then we have to create a minimum of twelve opportunities for use, authentic use to really know the words, lots of background. And a lot of times the materials that we have in our schools, the kind of books that children are going to be reading, they may be able to decode them, but can't, do they understand those words? Do they understand that the words have multiple meanings and uses? Do not assume that. Teach it, be explicit and systematic, use it as a routine that I'm really going to explore this word, its multiple meanings. I'm going to make sure that they heard it correctly, that they say it with the correct stress pattern and that they use it in lots of different contexts and authentic ways. That will get me to that deep comprehension.