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although elementary, useful nonetheless

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Non Fiction Rap.Nonfiction Text Features!.Nonfiction Text Features.Use text features to understand and interpret biography--Lesson 2 of 6 (Common Core RI.4.7).eSpark Learning: NonFiction Text Features Instructional Video (2.RI, Quest 5).Text Feature.Text Feature.Locate text features.Text Features

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Some Common Text Features within Non-Fiction

Captions: Help you better understand a picture or photograph

Comparisons: These sentences help you to picture something {Example: A whale shark is a little bit bigger than a school bus.}

Glossary: Helps you define words that are in the book

Graphics: Charts, graphs, or cutaways are used to help you understand what the author is trying to tell you

Illustrations/Photographs: Help you to know exactly what something looks like

Index: This is an alphabetical list of ideas that are in the book. It tells you what page the idea is on.

Labels: These help you identify a picture or a photograph and its parts

Maps: help you to understand where places are in the world

Special Print: When a word is bold, in italics, or underlined, it is an important word for you to know

Subtitles: These headings help you to know what the next section will be about

Table of Contents: Helps you identify key topics in the book in the order they are presented

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Shrinking: Directing students to the answer

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Shrinking: Directing students to the answer

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Highlight main ideas

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How Can Teachers Increase Classroom Use of Academic Vocabulary

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How Can Teachers Increase Classroom Use of Academic Vocabulary

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Great article with easy to use ideas.

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NCTE - National Council of Teachers of English

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QARs + Tables = Successful Comprehension of Math Word Problems - ReadWriteThink

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Using census data for an example, students use the question-answer relationship (QAR) strategy to understand and solve word problems that refer to tables and other graphics.

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Visualizing Vocabulary - National Writing Project

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As with all types of learning, the more relevant new words are made to students' lives, the more likely they are to take hold. When I discovered ABC books, I immediately thought of many ways to use them in my high school classroom.

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Top 10 Resources on Vocabulary | Reading Rockets

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Ranking Words

When considering which words need the most instructional attention, let's turn to Isabel Beck's practical way of categorizing vocabulary words into three tiers:

Tier One: Basic words that rarely require instructional focus (door, house, book).

Tier Two: Words that appear with high frequency, across a variety of domains, and are crucial when using mature, academic language (coincidence, reluctant, analysis).

Tier Three: Frequency of these words is quite low and often limited to specific fields of study (isotope, Reconstruction, Buddhism).

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Useful words

As a way to begin thinking about which words to teach, consider that words in the language have different levels of utility. In this regard, we have found our notion of tiers, as discussed in Chapter 1, to be one helpful lens through which to consider words for instructional attention. Recall that Tier One consists of the most basic words — clock, baby, happy — rarely requiring instruction in school. Tier Three includes words whose frequency of use is quite low, often being limited to specific domains — isotope, lathe, peninsula — and probably best learned when needed in a content area. Tier Two words are high-frequency words for mature language users — coincidence, absurd, industrious — and thus instruction in these words can add productively to an individual's language ability.

Identifying Tier Two words in textsTo get an idea of the process of identifying Tier Two words, consider an example. Below is the opening paragraph of a retelling of an old tale (Kohnke, 2001, p. 12) about a donkey who is under a magical spell that forces him to do the chores for a group of lazy servants. The story would likely be of interest to third and fourth graders.

Johnny Harrington was a kind master who treated his servants fairly. He was also a successful wool merchant, and his business required that he travel often. In his absence, his servants would tend to the fields and cattle and maintain the upkeep of his mansion. They performed their duties happily, for they felt fortunate to have such a benevolent and trusting master.

The underlined words are those we identified as consistent with the notion of Tier Two words. That is, most of the words are likely to appear frequently in a wide variety of texts and in the written and oral language of mature language users. (Note: We chose this paragraph because there were so many candidate Tier Two words; however, most grade-level material would not have so many words in only one paragraph.)

One "test" of whether a word meets the Tier Two criterion of being a useful addition to students' repertoires is to think about whether the students already have ways to express the concepts represented by the words. Would students be able to explain these words using words that are already well known to them? If that is the case, it suggests that the new words offer students more precise or mature ways of referring to ideas they already know about. One way to answer the question is to think about how average third and fourth graders would talk about the concepts represented by the Tier Two words. We think that students would be likely to offer the explanations shown in the accompanying list.

Tier Two wordsStudents' likely expressions
merchant | salesperson or clerk
required | have to
tend | take care of
maintain | keep going
performed | did
fortunate | lucky
benevolent | kindAdding the seven target words to young students' vocabulary repertoires would seem to be quite productive, because learning the words would allow students to describe with greater specificity people and situations with which they already have some familiarity. Note that these words are not simple synonyms of the familiar ones, however, instead representing more precise or more complex forms of the familiar words. Maintain means not only "keep going," for example, but also "to continue something in its present condition or at its present level." Benevolent has the dimension of tolerance as well as kindness.Back to top

Selecting from a pool of wordsThe decision about which words to teach must also take into account how many words to teach in conjunction with any given text or lesson. Given that students are learning vocabulary in social studies and science as well as reading or language arts, there needs to be some basis for limiting the number of words so that students will have the opportunity to learn some words well.Now consider which of the words will be most useful in helping students understand the above paragraph. For the seven words noted there, our thinking is that fortunate is particularly important because the fact that the servants thought they were lucky is an important condition of the story. Similarly, benevolent plays an important role in setting up the story, as the servants appreciate their master's kindness and do not want to upset their pleasant living situation. If one other word were to be selected, a good choice would be merchant. Merchant is a word that comes up in fourth- and fifth-grade social studies textbooks in discussions of colonization of the Americas (e.g., "European merchants were eager to locate new resources like tobacco and indigo which could be found in the colonies"; or "Colonial merchants were dismayed by the taxes on English goods which meant higher prices for their customers but no more profit for themselves").The other candidate words, tend, required, performed, and maintain, are also words of strong general utility, and the choice of whether to include any more words is based solely on considering how many words one thinks students can usefully handle.Back to top

You try it

Below is another excerpt from the tale about the donkey under the magical spell described above (Kohnke, 2001, p. 12). You might find it useful to try your hand at identifying Tier Two words. You will get to see our choices below the excerpt, so that you can compare your selections with ours.

The servants would never comment on this strange occurrence [finding the kitchen clean even though none of them were seen doing the cleaning], each servant hoping the other had tended to the chores. Never would they mention the loud noises they'd hear emerging from the kitchen in the in middle of the night. Nor would they admit to pulling the covers under their chins as they listened to the sound of haunting laughter that drifted down the halls to their bedrooms each night. In reality, they knew there was a more sinister reason behind their good fortune.

Which words did you select? Trying to be all-inclusive, selecting any words that might fit Tier Two, we chose comment, occurrence, tended, mention, emerging, admit, haunting, reality, sinister, and fortune. We considered them Tier Two words as we viewed them as fairly "general but sophisticated words." That is, they are not the most basic or common ways of expressing ideas, but they are familiar to mature language users as ordinary as opposed to specialized language. The concepts embodied in each word are ones that students already have some understanding of, as shown in the accompanying list.

Tier Two wordsStudents' likely expressions
comment | something someone has to say
occurrence | something happening
tended | took care of
mention | tell
emerging | coming out
admit to | say you did something
haunting | scary
reality | being real
sinister | scary
fortune | luck

Now, the notion of tiers of words is not a precise one, and the lines between tiers are not clear-cut, so your selection may not match ours. Thinking in terms of tiers is just a starting point — a way of framing the task of choosing candidate words for instruction (see the accompanying box). Even within Tier Two, some words will be more easily familiar and some will be more useful than others. For example, our hunch is that admit, reality, and fortune are likely known to most fourth or fifth graders; that tended is not often used in a way that is key to understanding; and that fifth graders may already associate haunting with scary things — a Halloween context — which is fitting for this story. Thus we ended up with comment, occurrence, mention, emerging, and sinister. We judged the first four of these to be most useful across a range of contexts, and we chose sinister because it is a strong word with emotional impact that is used in literature to describe fictional characters as well as in nonfiction, such as when describing a group's sinister plans to invade another's territory.

Some Criteria for Identifying Tier Two Words

Importance and utility: Words that are characteristic of mature language users and appear frequently across a variety of do-mains.

Instructional potential: Words that can be worked with in a vari-ety of ways so that students can build rich representations of them and of their connections to other words and concepts.

Conceptual understanding: Words for which students understand the general concept but provide precision and specificity in de-scribing the concept.

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Figure 1. Considerations for Selecting Vocabulary Words

Representative

Is the word representative of a family of words that students should know?

Is the concept represented by the word critical to understanding the text?

Is the word a label for an idea that students need to know?

Does the word represent an idea that is essential for understanding another concept?

Repeatability

Will the word be used again in this text? If so, does the word occur often enough to be redundant?

Will the word be used again during the school year?

Transportable

Will the word be used in group discussion?

Will the word be used in writing tasks?

Will the word be used in other content or subject areas?

Contextual Analysis

Can students use context clues to determine the correct or intended meaning of the word without instruction?

Structural Analysis

Can students use structural analysis to determine the correct or intended meaning of the word without instruction?

Cognitive Load

Have I identified too many words for students to successfully integrate?

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Vocabulary is at the core of literacy

Reading, writing, speaking, and listening are grounded in the formulation and understanding of written and verbal messages. Without meaning, words and phrases are nothing more than a nonsensical string of sounds or letters. Vocabulary is not an isolated skill; readers, writers, speakers, and listeners marshal what they know about words and phrases to understand and convey coherent messages in what Thorndike termed “a cooperation of many forces” (1917, p. 232). Vocabulary researchers have long advocated for instructional approaches that capitalize on these “many forces,” especially through teaching structural, contextual, and morphemic analysis skills (Baumann, Edwards, & Boland, 2003; Brusnighan & Folk, 2012), using oral language channels (Beck & McKeown, 2007), leveraging texts to facilitate discussion and interaction (Lennox, 2013), and teaching for word appreciation and word consciousness (Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2008).

The demand on vocabulary knowledge intensifies throughout the elementary and middle school years, especially in regard to print. Nagy and Anderson (1984) estimated that students entering ninth grade needed to know and understand 88,500 word families, stating that “even the most ruthlessly systematic direct vocabulary instruction could neither account for a significant proportion of all the words children actually learn, nor cover more than a modest proportion of the words they will encounter in school reading materials” (p. 304).

Yet in too many cases, vocabulary instruction is isolated from other aspects of the instructional day, particularly in content area learning. It is far too common to assign students a list of words (usually technical terms) that will be used in a social studies or science unit and then ask them to look up words and write definitions so that they can then compose solitary sentences. This limited exposure to words and phrases in decontextualized situations has not proven to be effective, nor is it of a sufficient intensity. In an observational study of Canadian upper elementary classrooms, Scott, Jamieson-Noel, and Asselin (2003) found that 39% of vocabulary instructional time was dedicated to definitions, mostly through dictionary and worksheet use. Vocabulary instruction in elementary content area classes was even more limited. The same researchers found that an average of only 1.4% of social studies, mathematics, science, and arts instructional time was devoted to vocabulary development. Whether your goal is to meet the demands of the Common Core State Standards, or for locations not impacted directly by these standards but where vocabulary is a significant concern, we recommend that teachers attend to four significant components of word learning: wide reading, selecting words to teach, modeling word solving, and providing students opportunities through collaborative conversations to actually use their growing vocabularies.

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General guidelines for vocabulary instruction

Research has produced several important general guidelines to aid teachers in developing effective approaches to voca-bulary instruction. We find three of these guidelines to be particularly cogent.

First, the fact that the average high school student knows about 40,000 words (Nagy & Herman, 1987) indicates clearly that students must learn many more word meanings than teachers can explicitly teach. Consequently, vocabulary instruction should be multifaceted, incorporating the teaching of individual words, the development of word learning strategies and the fostering of word consciousness (Baumann, Ware, & Edwards, 2007; Graves, 2006).

Second, teachers should vary their approach to teaching word meanings based on the nature of the target words (Graves, 2009; Stahl & Nagy, 2006). Graves (2009) has stressed the idea that “one size does not fit all” with regard to teaching word meanings, given that words differ in nature, ranging from concrete nouns like peninsula that are easily represented by visual images to densely conceptual terms likedemocracy that require a great deal of knowledge-building to understand, and that goals for student learning for a given word may range from beginning awareness to mastery.

Third, reviews of research on vocabulary instruction stress the limited effectiveness of instruction that focuses narrowly on dictionary definitions and support instruction that presents words in a variety of contexts, provides multiple exposures, and promotes students' active processing of new meanings (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2013; Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986).

These three guidelines provide general recommendations for planning vocabulary instruction. The books that we mentioned in the introduction go a step further, describing many instructional activities that teachers can use to operationalize these guidelines in classrooms. However, during the MCVIP Project, we found that optimal word-meaning instruction involved not just following general guidelines and implementing research-based activities but also applying a set of pragmatic principles that enhanced the feasibility, clarity, participatory nature, and accountability of word-meaning instruction.

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Word Analysis - Teach With Tech | Power Up What Works

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As you create your plan for teaching word analysis strategies, think about the kinds of tools and methods that can support student understanding and provide practice. How will you differentiate instruction and take advantage of technology tools to engage the diverse students in your classroom?

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Technology resources

Adaptive Curriculum
This interactive visualization and simulation software for middle and high school science features many different activities and simulations linked to national science standards. It also features virtual labs, simulations, quizzes, built-in glossaries, lesson plans and other classroom materials.

ARKive
Build background knowledge and help students engage with curriculum through the use of the videos, photography and other resources from ARKive, a collection of multimedia materials on endangered species. Games, classroom resources, and lesson plans are available.

ARKive Magnetic Fridge Poetry Game
Encourage your students to play with science vocabulary to create fun poems about wildlife using the Magnetic Fridge Poetry Game.

AccessScience
Subscription-based online science and technology reference materials which includes encyclopedia articles, videos, multimedia, definitions, and educator resources.

The Periodic Table of Videos
Scientists at the University of Nottingham have created a number of fun and engaging videos on various topics in chemistry, including videos illustrating each of the 118 chemical elements on the periodic table. Many of the videos are closed captioned and available with subtitles in a variety of languages.

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Implications for educators

There are several options, including technology, for teachers to support and accommodate all students, especially those for whom the language of science is a challenge:

Pre-teach vocabulary and ensure that students understand nuanced meanings, which can improve students' comprehension.

Use technologies that can strengthen students' background knowledge and vocabulary proficiency.

Make the expectations of science discourse explicit and let students know that part of succeeding in science both on tests and in life is using the proper language in scientifically appropriate ways.

Develop exercises that will help students strengthen their use of scientific discourse, including modeling correct oral and written expressions.

Search the TechMatrix for tools that support scientific discourse and have both the first level of support, such as glossaries, and the second level of discourse scaffolds.

Consider incorporating the resources listed below into your science curriculum.

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Common text features to explicitly teach students

Name of text featurePurpose of text feature
Title | Quickly tells the reader what information they will learn about
Table of contents | Shows students the different chapter or section titles and where they are located
Index | Directs students where to go in the text to find specific information on a topic, word, or person
Glossary | Identifies important vocabulary words for students and gives their definitions
Headings or subtitles | Help the reader identify the main idea for that section of text
Sidebars | Are set apart from the main text, (usually located on the side or bottom of the page) and elaborate on a detail mentioned in the text
Pictures and captions | Show an important object or idea from the text
Labeled diagrams | Allow readers to see detailed depictions of an object from the text with labels that teach the important components
Charts and graphs | Represent and show data related to, or elaborate on, something in the main body of text
Maps | Help a reader locate a place in the world that is related to text
Cutaways and cross sections | Allow readers to see inside something by dissolving part of a wall or to see all the layers of an object by bisecting it for viewing
Inset photos | Can show either a faraway view of something or a close-up shot of minute detail

Student guide for the text feature walk

1. In your small group, choose one person to start by reading the first text feature.

2. That person names the text feature (Is it a heading? Picture and caption? Map?).

3. That same person reads the text feature.

4. As a group, discuss any predictions, questions, and connections you have based on the text feature and discuss how you think it will relate to the main idea. Everyone should contribute.

5. Have a new person share the next text feature and repeat steps 2-4. Repeat until all of the text features have been discussed or the teacher calls time.

Fast finishers- If you have discussed all of the text features, think back and reflect on all of the text features you have read and discussed. Now, what do you expect to learn about? What do you think the main idea will be?