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!
Amen, Girl! We are both focused on business education. This puts us in the unique position of teaching students a great deal of life skills. We want them to be able to leave our class and feel confident that they will be able to read the newspaper, especially the business section, read a job application, be able to figure out various documents that are going to cross their proverbial desk. Maybe it will be a mortgage payment or a credit card bill or a health insurance's explanation of benefits. I also hope to learn how to implement some strategies for covering vocabulary in my classroom. The methods we tried last semester were not very successful. I, too, felt like we were constantly explaining the meaning of words. Some in our content and some were not. It made me feel as if the subject matter we were covering was over their heads, when it definitely should not have been. So much time was spent on vocabulary that we had to shorten the time spent on the actual lessons. I hope to be able to find success teaching vocabulary and spend less time doing it.
ReplyDeleteI am excited to see what both of you (Casie & Gina) come up with for your projects. I think an area like business is intimidating to many high school students because, as Gina alluded to, it deals with "real life" skills. What power you can have if you learn how to bridge important gaps for students and help them connect basic vocabulary to bigger "business" topics. It is great that you both had an experience in the fall with this issue, so you can really draw on your past experience with your students to help your research. I'm excited to see what kinds of strategies you might come up with helpful to teaching vocabulary, because I definitely agree it is needed in all content areas.
ReplyDeleteI think that this is a really important research topic. Vocabulary is the background for reading, in my opinion so I think your research will be very interesting. To me, understanding the vocabulary of the content is like the backbone for comprehension. For your specific content, if the students can grasp the vocabulary it can help them further themselves in their real-life job skills. Each content has its own vernacular, its own way of speaking to one another, and its important to have some understanding of it in order to carry on conversations with other people and overall it helps us become more knowledgeable on any subject.
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