Literacy Research Project

Prompts: What are your initial thoughts and ideas about your inquiry topic? What are your beginning ideas about your contribution to the inquiry project? How are you now understanding reading in your discipline?

For my research project I want to look into how teaching vocabulary can improve student's reading comprehension. Before now I did not know how to teach vocabulary to students. Now that I have been reading different articles and textbooks on adolescent literacy I am particularly interested in learning strategies to implement into my classroom that will help my students improve in literacy.

Last semester I had a difficult time teaching my students not only content vocabulary but even general vocabulary. I constantly had to stop and explain meanings of words throughout my lesson. I used BINGO and crossword puzzles to help the students learn the content terminology needed in order to understand what I was trying to teach them in the business classroom. At the time that was an effective way to grab the students' attention and let them know what words were important to know for their success in business content. Unfortunately these strategies were only a quick and easy way to get the students to memorize the meanings of certain words, not commit them to memory.

I believe that it is very important to teach my students content vocabulary and by doing this research project I hope that I will find successful strategies to use in my classroom no matter what content I am teaching. I feel that especially in the business content the terminology directly connects to the real-world and everyday language used on the news, in newspapers, the internet, and by business employees. I want my students to understand and get familiar with business terminology in order to help them in the future as they move on to get a job and be successful!