Multifaceted Vocabulary Instruction in a Third-Grade Class: Findings from a Three-Year Formative Experiment

Lessons from a Decade of Research on Multifaceted Vocabulary Instruction

“…VALE was designed to address the quality, quantity, and strategy dimensions of vocabulary instruction (Manyak & Manyak, 2021). Findings confirmed that the VALE intervention resulted in greatly accelerated growth in students’ general vocabulary in each of the 3 years of the experiment.…”

“…Recently, Neugebauer et al, (2017) demonstrated that teacher talk associated with word consciousness, such as affirming students’ recognition and use of target words, positively affected students’ word learning. In our projects, the concept of word consciousness appeared often in qualitative data, with teachers frequently describing their students’ burgeoning enthusiasm for words and researchers documenting cases of students’ unprompted attention to unfamiliar or unique words (Manyak & Manyak, 2021). We identified three key ways that the project teachers nurtured the development of a word‐consciousness culture in their classes.…”

“…I’ve learned that when you teach vocabulary intensively, it pays off exponentially in terms of creating that word‐conscious classroom. (Manyak & Manyak, 2021)…”

“…Finally, teachers were receptive to students as they independently engaged in what we termed bringing up words (Manyak & Manyak, 2021). We used this phrase to capture student behaviors such as showing teachers target or character trait words that they found in reading texts, asking about unfamiliar words that they encountered, keeping post‐it notes on their desks of affixed words to add to the class wall charts, and using target words outside of instructional settings.…”

“…Over the last decade, we have participated in three multiyear research studies focused on developing, implementing, and analyzing the outcomes of long‐term multifaceted vocabulary instruction (Manyak et al, 2020; Manyak & Manyak, 2021; Manyak & Kappus, under review). Taken together, these studies took place at each grade level from second to fifth and in a variety of school settings, including schools with large numbers of emergent bilinguals (EBs) and students from low‐income families.…”