Teaching Word Recognition

Have you struggled with teaching word recognition to your students? I have. I find it requires a lot of work to teach word recognition to the lower grades because the younger students do not have a lot of vocabulary yet and not a lot of prior knowledge to build off of. However, by the time the time students get to the third grade, they know more vocabulary than they did when they were in Kindergarten or first grade. Our text, Literacy for the 21^st Century (2010), have some suggestions for teaching word recognition. I have included examples of how I use these strategies in my own classroom.

        

      Introduce the words in context.

I always try to do this when introducing a new text in my guided reading groups. I frontload the vocabulary I think students will have trouble with, ask students if they are familiar with them and if not, provide the meaning of the word used in the context of the book. For my ESOL kids, I also provide synonyms of the words so they know there are several words with similar meanings.

      Have children chant and clap the words.

I think this is more appropriate for the lower grades, such as Kindergarten or even first grade. But this will not work so well with my third graders because I don’t think it is age appropriate.

      Have children practice reading and writing the words.

As students are reading their texts, I let students use highlighter tape to highlight the vocabulary words. Students can also practice writing the words by using them in sentences. This is mostly done at home for homework.

           Have children read and write the words.

My students do this more with their spelling words for homework. The strategy is called “Look, say, cover, write, check.” First they look at the word, they say the word aloud, cover the word, write the word, and check to see if they spelled it correctly. So far, this strategy seems to be working, especially for my ESOL kids. But I wonder if this is too easy for my third graders, especially for my high flyers. What do you think?

I believe word recognition is an important part of students reading skills. Although it requires some effort and takes time to teach word recognition; in the long run, students can benefit from it great as it helps to build their vocabulary and ability to read.

Any thoughts on teaching word recognition?