Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Teaching Strategies

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Literacy teaching strategies: VELS 1 & 2 | VELS 3 | VELS 4 | VELS 5 & 6

VELS level 1 & 2 – Teaching vocabulary

A variety of methods (of teaching vocabulary) leads to increased vocabulary learning.

National Reading Panel Report Teaching Children to Read.

Different methods for teaching vocabulary:

• Explicit instruction (definitions instruction including pre-teaching and analysis of root words)
• Implicit instruction (exposure to words during reading)
• Multimedia methods (pictures, hypertext)

Using analogy (connecting what one knows to the new word).

Vocabulary to build student's knowledge

The study (Snow, Dickinson and Tabors 2001) has shown that if children are exposed to decontextualised language in the home and rich vocabulary, then it is possible to predict that they will perform well in literacy in the early and middle years of schooling.

Contextualised talk features face-to-face interaction, often accompanied by action. Decontextualised talk is used for reflecting on experiences that are distant in time and place.

Opportunities within a balanced literacy program for rich language encounters to build students’ vocabulary knowledge include:

• literature (fiction, non-fiction)
• instructional texts (big books)
• guest speakers
• multimedia texts i.e. films, videos/DVD, web based texts
• animations
• rhymes, Chants, Poems, Jokes
• ‘read to’ cds and tapes
• drama scripts
• visual texts i.e. pictures, photos, cartoons and comic strips, paintings .