My entire life, I have been word-curious and a voracious reader. I remember little of elementary school save the marvelously guilty pleasure of tucking novels into my textbooks and reading my way through Religion and Math. As a generally a cooperative student, I don’t think I was scolded for my readerly habits, but I suppose if that happened, then I wasn’t paying attention or such admonishments left no scars. My mother tells me that my third grade teacher caught on to my book-within-book trick. She advised my mother that I needed more structure and less indulgence if I was to live up to my academic potential. Fortunately, whatever approaches my teacher and mother used to try and get me to focus more on my schoolwork did not come at the cost of my independent reading.
My parents understood my fascination with print, because both were avid readers themselves. They provided constant models of reading engagement and encouraged my sisters and me to follow in their bookish footsteps. My parents and siblings had (and continue to have) great vocabularies, and through everyday conversations in my household, I learned thousands upon thousands of words. My wide reading added to the words I gained from listening. Long before I heard the term “Matthew effect” or knew about the reciprocal relations between vocabulary knowledge, world knowledge, and reading comprehension, I experienced the benefits.
The seeds of my scholarly preoccupation with vocabulary acquisition and instruction were sown during my idyllic, bibliophilic childhood. This love for written language eventually led me to become a reading teacher and literacy specialist. During graduate school, I had the privilege of serving as a research assistant to two professors – Dr. Michael W. Kibby and Dr. William J. Rapaport — who were as word-curious as me. I learned tremendously from their insights about vocabulary acquisition, and from the articles and books we read and discussed in the team’s research meetings. Of particular interest to Drs. Rapaport and Kibby (cf: 2007), and by extension to me, was a word learning process called “contextual vocabulary acquisition,” or CVA. Much of my own research and writing in the years hence has been in that vein.
In the years since graduate school, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with ‘doing CVA.’ When I notice an unknown word while reading, I make significant effort to draw inferences about its possible meanings, reasoning about textual cues together with prior knowledge. It is harder for me to do that when I notice an unknown word in conversation, because speech is so much more ephemeral than print. But when I read, I can stop, reread, and be strategic. Thanks to the internet, I can also seek out additional contexts in which the word appears, and use these to inform my hypotheses.
I was fascinated to learn that this same sort of process – reading and reasoning about words as they appear in multiple print contexts – was in part how the Oxford English Dictionary was developed (cf: Winchester, 2005). Once I learned that, I began to think of myself, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as an ‘armchair lexicographer.’ Lexicography involves much more than ‘doing CVA.’ Still, I like the expression, so I am using it both as my moniker and as the title of this blog.
Across the next few months on this website, I will share a bit of what I’ve learned about vocabulary acquisition and instruction through my review of extant (published) literature as well as through empirical research. First, I will discuss what is meant by the term ‘mental lexicon’ and explore what it really means to ‘know’ a word. Then I will write about the relations between vocabulary knowledge, world knowledge, and reading comprehension, and explain why vocabulary development is an important goal for learners of all ages. Next, I will explain why wide reading is the best way to build lexical knowledge. This will lead me to the topic of contextual vocabulary acquisition, or CVA.
In another series of posts geared for teachers, I will clarify the distinction between teaching to develop sight vocabulary and teaching to develop meaning vocabulary. I will describe often-used techniques for teaching meaning vocabulary that don’t actually work too well, despite their popularity. Then I will discuss three approaches that do work well and explain in detail how teachers can use them to build students’ lexicons.
Along the way, as I lay this scholarly and pedagogical groundwork, I will post about interesting and unusual words I encounter ‘in the wilds’ of my own daily reading and model how I reason about their meanings and usages based on context and prior knowledge. I will also write about how I have researched CVA with high-school and college-age readers and what I have learned. I have a few more ambitious ideas for this blog as well, such as interviewing vocabulary researchers and reviewing books, but let’s just take things one post at a time, shall well?
Thank you for joining me on my armchair lexicography adventures. I look forward to reading your comments and suggestions! Until next time, happy reading!
References
Rapaport, W.J. & Kibby, M.W. (2007). Contextual vocabulary acquisition and computational philosophy and as philosophical computation. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 19 (1), 1-17.
Winchester, S. (2005). The professor and the madman: A tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Harper Perennial.
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