Teaching *English* Vocabulary

I found the Bromley article not only interesting, but infinitely more useful (and engaging) than the Bauman & Graves piece.

As an aspiring foreign language teacher, I'm going to end up teaching a good-sized chunk of English grammar alongside Latin. And these vocabulary-building strategies can easily be adapted to a Latin class (although there is still a place for vocab quizzes, or at the very least, I can’t bring myself to jettison them).

Fortunately for me, I’ll be all over the advice to teach students Greek and Latin roots of English words and that strategy (unsurprisingly) will do double duty as knowing Latin roots really helps one build up and strengthen Latin vocabulary. And, as if the roots weren’t enough, Latin will help students get used to a word having multiple meanings. My favorite example is the verb “aggredior” which can mean “advance to,” or “address” or “run up and stab” depending on the context in which it is used. Or, if that does not help students grow accustomed to words having multiple contextual meanings, it will show them that they cannot escape that phenomenon and had best get used to it.

The mention of “vocabulary notebooks” is particularly intriguing and one which I will have to experiment with. It sounds far more interesting than a deck of flashcards or a series of notes sprinkled about the notebook between bits of grammar and practice exercises.

Vocabulary and ways to build it

It is almost impossible to understand a passage if one cannot understand at least 95% of the words in it. This is true for all subjects, not just English. Fortunately, the readings which I did for this week list and describe a number of strategies which the enterprising educator can implement to aid their students.

Having said that, let us look at my favorite.

The first strategy described in the textbook (and a very similar one was buried near the end of the article) was the “Personal Glossary.” This is quite similar to the standard deck of flash cards which I remember seeing when I was a wide-eyed high schooler years ago; when an unknown word is found, it is written down on something (ideally an index card or something similarly shaped) on one side. On the other is a simplified definition (essentially what you’d find in the dictionary, sans the pronunciation and syllable indication) and an example sentence.

This handy little technique will work with anything which has text and a teacher can add a bit of guidance by “suggesting” certain words be added to the students’ growing glossaries. The fact that most of the work will be done by the students is a happy occurrence.

The Etymologia and Morphologia techniques are almost certain to get use in my classroom; I distinctly remember one of my professors telling us that the verb insulto which means “to be insolent, scoff, revile, abuse, taunt, insult” literally means “to jump up and down, blowing raspberries.” Whereas morphology is far more reliable in Latin, as you can reliably guess the meaning of a word if you know what its morphemes mean (a fossilized language does wonders for nailing down definitions).

Clever and Original TItle

Another week, another set of readings and another posting done after my Sunday morning activities.

First, I'll get the unpleasantness out of the way: The best thing about the BBR article, once again, was that it was short. That will be all which I shall say about that.

Next, is our Daniels and Zimmerman chapter. This, unsurprisingly, was more helpful, although it did echo a good bit of what we saw in Torvani last week (and even cited it, too). Of particular interest to me was that students tend to have trouble visualizing what they read. This typically shows up in math and science (according to our readings), but also in other subjects, like Latin. For instance, if you were to look at one of the (depressingly brief) readings on the Roman legions in the textbook, you'd see depressingly short description stating that a legionary wore iron armor made out of "banded strips," with a short sword and large shield.

Take a moment to picture that.

Now, look at these fellows:

Get some, Germans

This plays into another thing which I found quite helpful in Daniels and Zimmerman, and that's something I found between the lines, so to speak (and something which I struggle with): Avoid jargon/strange new words. I love big, borderline incomprehensible words. My students, however, do not. If they can't follow you, or visualize what you're saying/talking about, they're lost. And lost students do not learn.

Building Anticipation and Comprehension

I started with the BBR text this weekend, and I'll briefly sum up my thoughts on that chapter: Seen it already. It seems like I actively try and tear on this text, and I most assuredly did not have that in my mind this weekend. The primary 'new' thing which I took away from all the "comprehension builders" was the doodle diagram, which works quite similarly to a Venn diagram, except drawings are used in place of circles. And I don't see myself making use of these, given that I can't draw to save my life and would sooner translate Tacitus again than try and produce a sketch.

Torvani 6 can best be summed up as "provoke controversy and model for students." Not that there's anything wrong with that, but much of the chapter felt like, well, fluff to me. Having said that, the description of how to deal with recalcitrant struggling readers was quite helpful, and something which I jotted down to put in my folder of good ideas I intend steal from others.

Torvani 5 I summarized with a fun little phrase coined by Augustus: Fetina Lente, or "make haste slowly." Students tend to equate "reading quickly" with "reading well" and are loathe to do anything that will slow down their pace. Teachers also tend to have problems with turning into experts in their field. This usually means that the more we know, the harder and harder it is to decide what is worthwhile enough to be covered in class and what should be "secondary" material. That said, this may not be as big a problem for classical language teachers as it is for others, as our end of course exams tend to be either a passage to translate for accuracy or a large grammar test. And, as I've doubtlessly said dozens of times before, Latin builds off of what you learned earlier. For instance, if you can't keep your endings straight, your chances of reading a short passage are not good.

No relation to anything

Textbooks and Non-fiction

I'll up and admit that I found chapter 4 of Daniels and Zemelman to be a slog. The initial part of it was useful, but really wasn't anything I hadn't seen before (then again, I looked at the articles before reading the chapters, so that quite likely colored my opinion of the chapter in question), and the list of suggested classroom library materials, while quite lengthy and an excellent jumping-off point for most areas, did not really have much to offer the foreign language teacher (with the possible exception of Guns, Germs and Steel).

Chapter 3 of Daniels and Zemelman was, in my opinion, more engaging, although I quickly grew tired of the "Textbooks are bad, and here's why" tone of the chapter. They did offer suggestions for how to fix the problem, but I feel that they could have achieved their purpose with a tenth of the words used had they employed some Tacitean brevity.

The articles, unlike the text chapters, did give me two "Ah-ha!" moments. Allen provided some very good evidence that read-aloud time is not something for younger students, but can be successfully used in secondary classrooms. And Harvey had an an excellent quote (Which in essence is, "The primary purpose of education is to enhance understanding) and detailed the creation of "Wonder Books," which are a question log, which will hopefully spur students to seek answers to those questions and/or give the instructor items to work into lessons that will be of greater interest to students.

Tangentially, the readings featured a book called "The Year 1000" and didn't mention Emperor Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer, who really spiced up that time period.

Text Structure and Access

I don't mean to start off on a sour note, but I summed up the majority of the first chapter of BBR as, "standard introductory tripe." The only noteworthy thing in the entire passage was the list on page 27, which had already been covered in greater depth by our other readings.

Moving over to the D&Z selections, we were first shown that the authors' definition of "strategy" could mean one of four different things, which is not something that English usually permits its vocabulary words to do. Once I got past that initial moment of disequilibrium (and wondered why they didn't tidy that up with different terms for each definition), the authors gave us a veritable avalanche of reading strategies for student use before, during and after reading assignments. I was particularly interested in the Anticipation Guide, RAFT and Dramatic Role-playing. How I'll manage to work those into a foreign language classroom on most days, I know not. But I'm aware of them now, and can be pondering it.


The second D&Z chapter on making text readings more accessible flowed quite nicely after the first one (how to help students read them). The main take-away I had was that educators are often under great pressure to cover "everything," but we have nowhere near enough time for that. The primary work-around to the issue is the identification of "fenceposts" which are the biggest, most important ideas and concepts and hit those hard and thoroughly. I can see this being of more use in a history or literature class than a foreign language, or at least in my Latin class. If I had to use a visual metaphor, I would say Latin is more akin to a tower; nearly everything builds off of the first few concepts learned at the beginning of study.

Web Resource: Numen

Numen is a very, very handy electronic Latin word-study tool and dictionary. And as an added plus, it is completely work-safe. I would say any student who is capable of working an internet browser with a degree of competence is capable of using it. This, unsurprisingly, will be quite helpful to Latin students, although I would prefer to 'hide' it until students reach Latin III (as the dictionary will not only give you the word's definition, the principle parts, it also gives textual citations for where the word is found and has an option to show every single form...which is something Latin I's and II's do not need to see so soon). You can enter up to 50,000 words into the word study tool at a time, which will then give you the definitions and parts. It also features a handy little English -> Latin tool, which only allows one word at a time, but does give a multiplicity of definitions for your word you want to see in Latin. For those who miss how things used to be, there is an 'old-style,' browse-by-letter dictionary function as well.

It has an option to create an account (which is free), and upon registering, you can create decks of electronic flash cards with words you've looked up to drill yourself with. This, unsurprisingly, is very handy.

The site is not very commercial at all, with no advertisements that I noticed. On the whole, the site is quite easy to navigate, but it has been rather unresponsive at times recently (possibly linked to server issues, or just my ISP being distinctly unhelpful).

I would say there is no adult supervision needed, beyond monitoring students to keep them from typing dirty words into the English -> Latin tool and learning some words that they don't need to know.