Using Implicit and Explicit Vocabulary Instruction to Increase Student Reading Comprehension (SOR Summer Series Part 3)

You’re listening to episode number 201 of the Stellar Teacher Podcast.

Welcome back to another episode of our Stellar Teacher Science of Reading Summer Series! Every Thursday, we are going to be sharing a bonus episode where I’m going to share some really practical strategies and specific action steps that you can take to really make sure that your literacy instruction is aligned to the Science of Reading this next year.

Now before I talk about today’s specific focus, which has to do with vocabulary, I always like to start off with an explanation of what the Science of Reading is and why this is something we should care about. So for the past few episodes, I’ve been starting off my episodes explaining the Science of Reading using the simple view of reading, but this week, we are going to revisit one of my favorite models, which is Scarborough’s Reading Rope. And you’ll probably notice that it actually has a lot of similarities to the simple view of reading model.

So if you look at Scarborough’s Reading Rope, I want you to envision an actual rope that has two strands that are woven together. And these two strands are word recognition and language comprehension. And word recognition refers to our students ability to actually read and decode the words in the text. And then language comprehension refers to their ability to understand and make meaning of the words in the texts that they read or hear. And in Scarborough’s Reading Rope model, the word recognition strand and language comprehension strand are woven together over and over and over again. And when this happens, the result is that we have created skilled readers. So ultimately, just like the Simple View of Reading, Scarborough’s Reading Rope reminds us that both word recognition and language comprehension are necessary if we want our students to become skilled readers. Now, each of these strands word recognition and language comprehension strand have multiple aspects and elements, many of which we talk about on this podcast. And one of the elements of language comprehension is vocabulary. So today, I’m going to talk about two different types of vocabulary instruction that you want to provide in your classroom. And those are explicit and implicit vocabulary instruction.

So first of all, let’s talk about explicit vocabulary instruction. So explicit vocabulary instruction is when you are explicitly or directly teaching new vocabulary words to your students. This is when you have identified a word that you want to or need to teach to your students and you are formally going to teach it to them. This form of vocabulary instruction really allows you to be intentional about the words that you are teaching. So you might choose to use explicit vocabulary instruction, when you introduce a new vocabulary word for a story or a text that you’re going to read. You might use it when you’re going to introduce a content word in science, social studies, or math, because remember, vocabulary is important for all subjects, not just reading. You might use explicit vocabulary instruction when you are introducing a tier two vocabulary word that you want your students to know.

So let’s talk a little bit about what exactly does explicit vocabulary instruction look like. And if you’ve listened to the podcast episode for a while, or the podcast for a while, then some of these steps actually might sound familiar to you because I’ve talked about effective vocabulary instruction before. So ultimately, when we are providing explicit vocabulary instruction, we want to include several different things and kind of follow a specific set of steps to be very clear about how we’re introducing the word.

So the very first thing you want to do is introduce the word to your students and make sure they know how to say the word. So you could show your students you know whether it’s a slide or write it on the board, you could show them the word and have them repeat it a few times. So if the word was disengaged, you’d have that on the board, you would say today I’m going to teach you about the word disengaged, what’s the word and your students would say disengaged, we want to make sure that they’re able to actually repeat the word and say it correctly.

We also want to make sure that we are defining the word using a kid friendly definition. We want to use terms that are simple to define the word we don’t want to give a very long definition. We want it to be something that our students can connect to and relate to. There are lots of you know, if you even just do a Google search for student friendly, kid friendly definition. Or if you look for like a dictionary that is really helpful for English language learners. A lot of times those definitions are great to introduce vocabulary words to our students.

In addition to a definition, we also want to use a visual aid. Ideally, this would be a real life photograph could do a quick Google search or there’s a lot of stock photography websites. But we want to find a real life photograph that communicates the concept or the idea of the word. This can really help clarify an abstract concept and showing students that photograph can really help the word become sticky so that they remember it.

We also want to take some time to analyze the word structure. So you want to show your students if the word you are introducing has prefixes, suffixes or roots. You could also have them identify or you would identify the origin of the word, you could break it down into syllables, you could also identify the part of speech at the word so having to pay attention to all the aspects that make up this word.

You also want to make sure that you are clarifying the meaning by using the word in context. So this means that you would come up with two to three sentences that use the word so that students can see how it is used in different scenarios. I know a lot of times, we want to just use the sentence that the word is in the text if it’s coming from our read aloud, and that’s fine. But in addition, we want to come up with a couple other sentences so students can really understand how this word would be used.

And then finally, you want to connect the word to other words, this could be sharing a list of synonyms, or it could be sharing other related words, so students can start to understand words that are connected. So for example, if your word is transformation, you could also show them or introduce them to the words transform, transforming and transformed. Let them know that all of these words are connected through meaning.

So I know that sounds like a lot of things to do. But remember, when we are explicitly teaching vocabulary words, we are going in depth, that is the goal. We want our students to have a really solid understanding of the word, and oftentimes just giving them the word in the definition isn’t enough. So we want to cover all of these things, pronouncing the word, definition, visual, analyzing the word, clarifying it with context, connecting it to other words. When we do these things, even if we do them for fewer words, but go more in depth, it is going to be much more effective than if you’re trying to teach your students more words, but you don’t have the time to go as in depth. So slow down, take the time to provide the explicit vocabulary instruction.

Okay, so that is one type of vocabulary instruction. But that is not the only type of instruction we want to have in our classroom. We also want to be intentional about providing implicit vocabulary instruction. And implicit vocabulary instruction happens in those teachable moments. It’s less formal, it’s a lot more natural. And I think ultimately, when we are using implicit vocabulary instruction, it encourages our students to become word watchers, which is something we’ve talked about before. It’s this idea that we want our students to pay attention to words. We want them to be aware of words. We want them to be interested in words. And when we implicitly teach vocabulary that just shows our students that words are important.

So what does implicit vocabulary instruction look like? This means that maybe you’re reading from a class novel, and you pause at a word, and you discuss it with your students. You might not have a formal Slides presentation or a poster to break it down the same way you would if you were explicitly teaching. But you can still model with a think aloud how to break down the word into syllables, so that way you can pronounce it. You can model how to use context clues or word parts to help determine the meaning of the word. You might discuss this word with your students and how you know similar words that are connected to it. Implicit vocabulary instruction can be very organic and very natural. In the moment, you might decide to add that word to an interactive student word wall or a vocabulary journal. And I think it’s really important that we teach vocabulary implicitly through read alouds and class discussions, because we want to show students that we can think about the words that we read in here. And we can use the knowledge that we have of word parts, context, clues, syllables, synonyms, or our just general vocabulary, knowledge. And all of these things can help us understand the words that we see and hear when we are reading.

So that’s one way that you might provide implicit vocabulary instruction. But another really easy way. And I think this can be a lot of fun. But another really easy way to use implicit vocabulary instruction is to really elevate your word choice when you are giving classroom directions. And I think it’s just simply being aware of opportunities where you can use more advanced words. So instead of saying “lineup at the door”, you could say, “assemble in a single file line at the door”. Both assemble and single file is going to be much more specific and words that your students probably don’t hear every day, but it gives you an opportunity to go in depth. Instead of saying, “okay, come sit on the carpet”, you could say “gather around the perimeter of the rug”. Again, gather and perimeter are words that are probably a little more elevated than your normal Common Language. Instead of saying “go pack up your backpack”, try saying “collect your belongings and prepare for departure”. You could even say “accumulate your belongings and prepare for departure”. You know, all of those words in there are just so much more specific. And it reminds your students or gives your students an opportunity to think about these words. But as you were saying these phrases, you can also model things like using context clues or sharing synonyms. So that way students can easily pick up on the meaning of these words.

Words are fun, you know, and implicit vocabulary instruction, I think can be a really fun and creative way for us to just continue to expand our students vocabulary. And the reason why vocabulary is so important, there is this theory out there that you may have seen or heard in your literacy teacher journey. And that is called the Matthew Effect. And the Matthew Effect basically says that literacy skills like vocabulary, build upon each other and gain momentum, like in a snowball effect. And so students who start out with stronger foundational reading skills are able to build their abilities at a faster rate. And this applies to vocabulary because the bigger a student’s vocabulary is, the easier it’s going to be for them to read complex texts with understanding. And the more they read complex texts, with new and interesting vocabulary words, the easier it’s going to be for them to acquire new vocabulary. So it’s like, the bigger their vocabulary is, the easier it’s going to be for them to have an even bigger vocabulary. But if a student has a poor vocabulary, then they are going to progress at a much slower rate, and their ability to acquire new words is going to be much slower. And so if they read complex texts, they’re not going to be able to pull out the vocabulary words that are new and interesting because they are struggling to make meaning of that text. So we really want to be intentional about providing both explicit and implicit vocabulary instruction for our students because it really is going to make a difference in their overall comprehension.

Now, if you are looking for resources to help you be intentional, especially with explicit instruction, then we would love to invite you to join us inside the Stellar Literacy Collective. This year, our whole group lessons specific for third, fourth and fifth grade have a built in explicit vocabulary lesson that really follows the steps that I shared in this episode. So if you love the idea of not having to plan your explicit vocabulary lessons, and you also would love to have slides to teach them whole group, then add your name to the waitlist so that way you can be notified when doors open up later this summer. That is stellarteacher.com/waitlist. And then don’t forget, be sure to tune in next Monday for our regular podcast episodes. And then come back next Thursday for the next episode in our Stellar Teacher Science of Reading Summer Series. I’ll see you then.

Thanks so much for joining me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode and are finding value in this podcast, it would mean the world to me if you subscribe and leave a five star positive review. This helps me spread the word to more and more teachers just like you. Don’t forget to join me over on Instagram @thestellarteachercompany. And you can also find links and resources from this episode in the show notes at stellarteacher.com. I’ll see you back here next week.