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Long after many students have developed a love of reading, they continue to struggle with reading in their content classes. Like the young man who authored the quote in this title, many students walk away from content reading with a vague sense that a specific word should go with a text or class but unsure of what the word actually means or even what the word really is. Students cite two difficulties that consistently get in the way of success for them during content reading: boring texts and too many difficult words.
As teachers, we may know that the traditional method of assign, define, and test does not bring about the depth of understanding necessary to support content reading, but the dilemma remains of how to discover methods that would be more effective. As Baumann and Kameenui (1991) say in their synthesis of research related to vocabulary instruction: "We know too much to say we know too little, and we know too little to say that we know enough." One of the areas where we do know enough is in our knowledge of the value of using two levels of instructional support for specialized content vocabulary: verbal association that supports general content language, and explicit instruction that highlights specific words where lack of understanding would impede reading comprehension.
Verbal Association to Anticipate Content
Anticipating words based on titles, content, illustrations, graphs, charts, and text type not only supports the critical role of word connections but also offers students a strategy for activating background knowledge prior to reading. I have found this especially effective prior to reading expository texts. For example, prior to reading with an informational text such as in USA Today, "Kids Drink Too Much Juice, Doctors Say," I would give each group a copy of the graphic "Things We Can Read from A-Z" (see Figure 1). While writing Yellow Brick Roads (Allen, 2000), I introduced this graphic to classroom teachers; our purpose at that time was to gather words. However, in this case we have appropriated it to use as a way to anticipate content language.
I begin by writing the article's title and subtitle, "Parents urged to limit intake to aid health," on the board, chart, or overhead. After reading these titles...