Pytash: Chapter 2

I really enjoyed this chapter; all of the information in chapoter 2 I will use when I get my chance in the classroom. During my time at Firestone last semseter and tutoring this semseter I saw how vocabulary acquisition was so crucial for students to be able to read, comprehend and express themselves. I always took vocabulary acquistion for granted, my dad stressed my learning new words all the time, he would come home and throw out these new words and expect me to know them. Today I love to learn new words and use them as soon as I get a chance to, I have noticed that in comedys they now use outdated vocaulary that most peopel don't know to get laughs. I believe that people who value learning are inately intruiged to learn new words in their lanugage. So when I teach I am going to need to motivate my students to see the benifits of having large vocabulary, this will enable them to intruiged by new words, because the students belive they will benifit at some level for learning these new words. The work done by Stahl and Shiel done in 1992 points out what I believe are the keys for an individual to be able to acquire new vocabulary when one incounter a word they have never seen before. They found that vocabulary instruction must be productive for the learner by stressing the following: teaching prefixies, suffixes, and roots; teachign students to derive meaning from the context; and teaching words as part of semanitc groupings. I'm not claiming to be as bright as Stahl and Shiel, but before I ever read this I was teching my student to decipher new word by noticing prefixes, suffixes and roots, and telling him to derive meaning of the new word by understandign the context it is being used in. I told my student to do this becasue this is how I have always figured out what new worsd mean, I feel fro mmy own experiences that this is the best wayto learn vocabulary, but this doesn't cover all words some words have roots that an average person wold not have a clue aout, so students do at one point need to be introduced to these words strait up and told what they mean. I was really proud of myself for beign able to comprehend that passage from "The Fall of the House of Usher", but I know that there are a lot of students out there that would not know where to start with this passage. I was insipred by the author's idea that this passage was all about setting the mood for the restof the story, so the students ought to investigate what words are meant to set the mood, adn then investigate those words. When the author posed the question"what vocabulary words should we teach?", I was a bit confused becuse I thought that teachers were probably assigned vocabulary lists from the department head or the state. I would probably teach vocabulary words that we will run into throguhout the semester in literature, but not only in my class, I would talk to other teahers of studnets in my classand see what advanced vocabulary they have been using and try to work it into my class to show the students that learning new words will positivly impact them in life. Lastly, I will probably keep this book becuase of the great ideas it has in it, one in particular is the vocabulary activity the author uses with Julius Caesar . Going in-depth into four new voaculary words that describe human characteristics, have the students apply these desciptive words to people they know(not other stuents unless positive), then write about how they display one of these new words, then have a scale for ecah of the new words and have the student place themselves on each scale. This activity will creat understanding of new words,and has students apply these new words to their lives.