Summary
Highlights
The video opens by stressing the importance of carefully selecting words for instruction and understanding their profound impact on student comprehension. It provides examples, such as 'aristocrat' (Tier 3) and 'minor' (Tier 2), to illustrate how different words can clarify or confuse understanding depending on the students' grade level and background knowledge.
The speaker introduces the three tiers of words championed by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan: Tier 1 (general), Tier 2 (cross-domain/general academic), and Tier 3 (discipline-specific). It is noted that, according to research, limiting instructional words to 8-10 per week is ideal to manage cognitive load, referencing Miller's work on operating memory.
Hebert (2009) proposed three general criteria for selecting words: words critical for text comprehension, words likely to appear in future texts, and words part of a word family or semantic network. The video also defines 'essential', 'valuable', 'accessible', and 'imported' words, explaining their characteristics and importance in different contexts like narrative vs. informational texts.
A detailed six-step process for selecting words for instruction is presented: 1. Identify potentially unfamiliar words. 2. Determine essential words for text comprehension. 3. Identify valuable words for broader application. 4. Pinpoint accessible words for students with limited vocabulary. 5. Consider imported words that enhance understanding but aren't in the text. 6. Determine the appropriate level of instruction for each word, ranging from brief mention to robust teaching.
The video clarifies that not all selected words require robust instruction; some might only need a brief mention to scaffold student understanding. It also distinguishes between essential words in narrative texts (often appearing once) and informational texts (repeated numerous times) due to their nature. The non-repetition in narrative texts often makes word selection a unique challenge.