Annie Savoy provided us with an educationally sound closing line for many arguments. “…it’s a fact. You could look it up.” (Bull Durham)
We have danced around the proposition that a college degree is the goal of American public education for years. Depending upon the place and time and the audience, the argument has been made that a college-level education is the best ticket to career success. Against that argument many believe that college is overrated and increasingly irrelevant. Or, college is too expensive and the subsequent years of student debt are unacceptable. Or, a technical education provides more powerful employment skills than a baccalaureate degree. Regardless, few have contemplated a well-prepared future generation without their education. Liberal arts education, professional education, technical education – it doesn’t make a difference. An education is a key to adult success. It’s a fact; you could look it up.
There are many variables that correlate with school success, but few are as compelling as the early educational advantage of children with large basic vocabularies. Although pertinent studies connect a child’s vocabulary with parental socio-economic status, the more relevant correlation is that school success is academic and the depth and breadth of a child’s academic vocabulary is a strong predictor of school success. Further, the quality of a student’s vocabulary is not only advantageous for early education but exceptionally advantageous for college and career entrance exams. Gateway exams are unforgiving of candidates whose vocabulary limits their ability to adequately make a response let alone understand the question. Academic gateways are correlated with the aspirant’s vocabulary. It’s a fact; you could look it up.
This being true, why then does vocabulary remain a subject apart in the mandated curricula of most schools? Reading, writing, spelling, language usage – these ELA topics receive the priority of our time and effort and vocabulary is treated as their very poor step-sister. The most commercial reading basals present vocabulary as a preparation for the next story the child will read. Words are treated as isolated words and are the words that the publisher or teacher believes to be interesting or important to understanding the text.
Seldom does instruction teach children the skills necessary for vocabulary building. Studies point to three linguistic skills that propel vocabulary building. http://www.edweek.org/media/proctor-silverman-harring-montecillo2012.pdf Instead of teaching words as words, vocabulary instruction should teach a student to use morphology, semantics and context as skills for building a greater depth of vocabulary. Breadth of vocabulary is a quantity of discrete words; depth of vocabulary is the quality of word relationships. Morphology, semantic and context skills help children understand the words they use as well as the new words they encounter. It’s a fact; you could look it up.
An exception to the few states that are committed to the instruction of vocabulary is the Tennessee Academic Vocabulary project that provides a vocabulary-building manual for Tennessee educators. http://www.tn.gov/education/ci/doc/VOCABULARY.pdf The Tennessee project promotes the linguistic skills of morphology, semantics and context for the instruction of approximately 400 terms and phrases per year. Of these, 131 are prescribed and 269 are to be selected by a teacher.
However, even the Tennessee project comes up short if vocabulary remains the assignment of an English/Language Arts teacher alone. 400 words annually times 13 years of schooling may produce a 5,200 word vocabulary. This is not enough! Every teacher assigned to a child must instruct the vocabulary of their subject, be it math or social studies or music or health or physical education. The Marzano study shows that the social sciences have the greatest number of basic terms and phrases, 4,352 terms as compared with 773 science terms. If left to the language arts teacher singularly, content area special terms will not be adequately learned. If five teachers, a minimal number, teach vocabulary to a child every year for thirteen years they may produce a vocabulary of 26,000 words. This is a beginning considering that an average adult will encounter 88,500 words in a lifetime of reading. It’s a fact; you could look it up.
The real proposition about the educational endgame is not the resultant degree, BA versus AA, but is the quality of the education sufficient to prepare the graduate for a successful future. One measure of this preparation must be a graduate’s ability to prosper in a world that is adding about 20,000 new words every year or one word every two minutes. It’s a fact; you could look it up.
Vocabulary cannot be an afterthought. We need to teach more and more words or our children’s academic health will starve to death.