Teaching Academic Vocabulary to Sixth-Grade Students With Disabilities

Abstract

Adolescents with disabilities have great difficulty with academic content in middle school, and their teachers have difficulty teaching them to understand and use academic language. We taught teachers of sixth-grade students with learning disabilities, more than half of whom were also English language learners (ELLs), to implement about 15 min of daily interactive vocabulary instruction in their intact special education English/language arts classes. Three schools were assigned randomly to treatment (two schools) or control conditions (one school, 52 students total). We developed instructional routines to introduce four new words per week in three 4-week units to test for replicability. ANCOVAs (with each cycle’s pretest and intelligence quotient as covariates) were conducted on taught vocabulary, all of which favored the treatment condition with effect sizes ranging .6 to .7 per cycle. Near-transfer effects to vocabulary usage were weaker, with significant effects in the last two cycles. Effects were similar for students with disabilities who were ELLs and native English speakers. Treated students maintained their knowledge of words 4 to 24 weeks following the close of treatment.

A Synthesis of the Sustainability of Remedial Reading Intervention Effects for Struggling Adolescent Readers

“…Across both studies, there was no clear trend on the benefits of intervention for treatment group students. Similarly, the effects of vocabulary and word reading instruction for adolescent struggling readers also did not depict a clear trend of benefits for treatment group students at follow-up time points (Kennedy et al, 2015; O’Connor et al, 2019; Vachon, 1999).…”

“…Participants in nine studies included in this synthesis were sixth, seventh, eighth, and/or ninth graders (Berkeley et al, 2011; Clarke et al, 2017; Esser, 2001; Haines et al, 2018; Jitendra et al, 2000; Lane, 1997; Newbern, 1998; O’Connor et al, 2019; Vachon, 1999). Participants in one study (Kennedy et al, 2015) were 10th graders.…”

“…Participants in one study (Kennedy et al, 2015) were 10th graders. Participants in six studies were selected due to their school/district identification of LD (Berkeley et al, 2011; Esser, 2001; Jitendra et al, 2000; Kennedy et al, 2015; Newbern, 1998; O’Connor et al, 2019). Four studies included students who did not have an LD identification but were below grade level on a standardized reading measure (Clarke et al, 2017; Haines et al, 2018; Lane, 1997; Vachon, 1999).…”

Systematic CHAAOS: Teaching Vocabulary in English/Language Arts Special Education Classes in Middle School

“…In Year 1 of this multi-year study, students in CHAAOS classes were taught 48 academic words by their SpEd teachers. Students in CHAAOS learned and maintained significantly more grade-appropriate academic words than students in business-as-usual (BAU) classes; however, students in CHAAOS classes did not outperform the BAU on standardized measures of vocabulary or reading (O’Connor et al, 2019). In the work we report here (Year 2), we follow the original sixth grade students into seventh grade to add an additional year of vocabulary instruction and determine its effects.…”

“…As part of a multi-year study, we developed a vocabulary intervention for students who have LD and other disabilities in middle school and also for students who are ELL with LD: Creating Habits that Accelerate Academic Vocabulary of Students (CHAAOS). We implemented it with sixth grade special education (SpEd) teachers and students in its first year (O’Connor et al, 2019) and with seventh grade teachers and students in this current study to determine the effects of a second year of intervention on proximal and distal measures. In the “Vocabulary Intervention” section that follows, we describe the vocabulary research that led to the design of the CHAAOS intervention.…”