Words, words, everywhere, but which ones do we teach?

Graves, M.F., Baumann, J.F., Blachowicz, C.L.Z., Manyak, P., Bates, A., Cieply, C., Davis, J.R., & Von Gunten, H. (2014). Words, words, everywhere, but which ones do we teach? The Reading Teacher, 67(5), 333-346.


How do you decide which words from a reading selection to teach to elementary grade children? This is a question that every elementary teacher struggles with on a daily basis. The texts we use in reading instruction are full of words. Research tells us that good word instruction can help children comprehend texts better, but it also tells us that children won’t learn those words if we try to teach too many of them at once, and besides, it is hard to do it well when you have a long list to get through. How does a teacher decide which words to teach, and how to teach them?

This article, which reports the findings of a large-scale study in fourth grade classrooms conducted by a large team of educators (the first three authors are well-known and prolific “stars” in the literacy education world), addresses this everyday teaching dilemma. The researchers devised and tested an approach they have named SWIT: Selecting Words for Instruction from Texts. SWIT attempts to blend the best points from three currently popular approaches, the word list approach that recommends choosing from lists made by experts, the genre approach that recommends different choices for different text genres, and the “tier” approach that proposes three tiers of words from basic (Tier One) to general, high utility (Tier Two), to lower frequency domain-specific (Tier Three).

SWIT provides a process for deciding what words to teach and how to teach them. I liked the clarity of the four SWIT steps, but even more, I liked the sense that the teacher is in control and capable of making good instructional decisions for students. SWIT provides some extra scaffolding for that decision process, though the authors state that even so, this is a difficult kind of decision-making, and always will be. However, their work tells us that teachers can make good decisions on which words to teach and how to teach them. Yes, it is hard, but we will get better at it the more we do it and the more we reflect as we do it. The teacher ultimately has to decide, and SWIT provides a helpful framework for developing and honing those decision-making skills.

Here are the SWIT steps:
1. Identify Potentially Unfamiliar Words: This step is a form of brainstorming. The teacher goes through the text to be taught and highlights any and all words that might be unfamiliar to students. This step will result in more words than can possibly be taught, and will have to be narrowed, but it is a necessary first step. If any and all possible words are out on the table, then choices can be made and the process seems manageable. If one started already trying to narrow this down, that would make the process more difficult and agonizing.
2. Identify the Four Types of Words to Teach: This system of classifying the words that resulted from Step 1 is one of the most helpful aspects of SWIT. The authors provide a helpful tool, a simple table, for doing this. The four word types are Essential Words (words that are central to understanding the text), Valuable Words (words that are useful for reading and writing texts in general and may have high future utility), Accessible Words (high frequency words that might be unknown to many students), and Imported Words (words that may not necessarily be explicitly in the texts, but which may relate to concepts that would help readers understand the text better). The classifications are potentially powerful in helping teachers reflect on how words function within a text. These categories might even be shared with older children, who could even sometimes assist in selecting words for instruction. That would be a powerful, high-level, “rigorous” kind of learning activity!
3. Determine the Optimal Type of Instruction: Three types of instruction are described here. The first type, called “Powerful Instruction” is the most time-consuming, the most intense, and receives the most space in this article. To look more closely at that model, readers will need to go to the article itself, but it is essentially an enhanced form of Direct Instruction (not surprising with Baumann as second author, since research on that model is what he is best known for) that employs many of the tenets of what is known as good vocabulary instruction: the use of many examples, relating words to prior knowledge, grouping related words and teaching them together, using words in meaningful contexts, and more. Deciding which words warrant the investment required for Powerful Instruction is probably still the hardest part of the whole process. Other words might be classified as only needing a brief explanation when they are encountered, and still others can likely be inferred from the context during reading. Of course, a reader would have to have already acquired inference skills to do that. Some words might provide opportunities to build and practice those skills.
4. Implement Vocabulary Instruction: Of course, in the end the teacher has to stop planning and actually make the instruction happen. Some teachers are going to be better at this than others, as teacher educators like me know only too well. One can make a beautiful, reflected-upon plan, but it still has to “fly” in a particular classroom on a particular day with a particular teacher and a particular group of students. As a teacher educator, I can present Graves et al’s approach as a scaffold. I can facilitate opportunities for supported practice. In the end, though, they have to go out there and do it.

The authors present two helpful classroom examples of how study participant teachers used the SWIT approach with two specific texts, one narrative text and one informational text. I must still try this approach out with the teacher candidates I work with, and I plan to do so soon. I recommend others try SWIT out for themselves as well. I believe it has potential for improving elementary vocabulary instruction, and it seems congruent with what the Common Core State Standards are asking teachers to accomplish with students. I’ll try it and see what happens.