Which Words to Teach? Relationships Between Teaching Academic Vocabulary and Text Comprehension

• In Event: Understanding New Approaches to Early Language and Literacy Development

Abstract

Research has established the important role of academic vocabulary knowledge in text comprehension (Lawrence et al., 2019; Wright & Cervetti, 2017). Academic vocabulary has been variably defined, often including various taxonomies or corpora of words used in academic settings to include general academic words (high-utility words common across academic texts and tasks) and domain-specific words (words specific to a topic or content area) (Beck et al., 2013; Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Prior studies have examined the relationship between teaching academic vocabulary words and text comprehension in various content areas (Fitzgerald et al., 2020; Gallagher et al., 2019; McKeown et al., 2018). Little research has explored how teaching different types of academic vocabulary relate to children’s comprehension of informational texts.

The current study explored teaching academic vocabulary to children in second grade. The study employed a within-subjects design to examine the differential relationships between pre-teaching general academic, domain-specific, and no vocabulary on comprehension of informational texts focused on conceptually-related social studies topics (civics and government). The sets of words identified within the texts were drawn from existing corpora; general-academic words were selected from the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 1998), and domain-specific words were selected from the Marzano Word List (Marzano & Pickering, 2005) for social studies. Participating children worked one-on-one with a researcher, who introduced the vocabulary and played interactive games using the words to build the children’s knowledge of the words. The researcher read an informational text including those words with the child, then the child answered questions to gauge their comprehension of the text. This procedure was repeated for three texts and conditions: general academic, domain-specific, and control (no vocabulary taught). Word sets and order of texts were counterbalanced between participants to minimize the impacts of text differences or order on the comprehension outcomes.

Initial analysis of data from the first round of data collection (n=47 participants) utilized a repeated-measures ANOVA, and there was a significant effect of condition on text comprehension, F(2, 92) = 5.69, p<.05. Pairwise comparisons indicate pre-teaching domain-specific vocabulary from the text was associated with significantly higher mean scores on a text comprehension measure as compared to pre-teaching no vocabulary (p<.05). Mean comprehension scores after pre-teaching domain-specific vocabulary were higher than after pre-teaching general-academic vocabulary, and pre-teaching general-academic vocabulary was associated with higher comprehension scores than pre-teaching no vocabulary, but these relationships were not statistically significant (p>.10).

Authors

• Jill F. Grifenhagen, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author

• Courtney Weathers, North Carolina State University
  Non-Presenting Author