Abstract

Although research provides ample evidence of teaching methods that facilitate students’ learning of specific word meanings, the potential of instruction to impact students’ general vocabulary knowledge has remained an unanswered question. This article reports on a three-year formative experiment that developed, implemented, and tested a long-term, multifaceted vocabulary instruction program in a third-grade classroom. Specifically, it presents quantitative findings that demonstrate greatly accelerated growth in general vocabulary, in comparison to the norming sample of a standardized vocabulary test, for three consecutive classes of students and qualitative findings that illuminate the students’ participation in the vocabulary instruction and the teacher’s expanding vision for and skill in teaching vocabulary. The authors conclude by discussing the significance and the limitations of these findings and highlighting the specific ways that their uniquely successful intervention may inform future research aimed at enhancing elementary students’ vocabulary development.

摘要

尽管研究提供了足以促进学生学习特定单词含义的教学方法的充分证据，但教学影响学生的一般词汇知识的潜力仍然是一个尚未解决的问题。本文报告了一项为期三年的形成性实验，该实验在三年级的课堂中开发，实施和测试了长期的，多方面的词汇教学程序。具体而言，它提供了定量的结果，与连续三个班级的标准化词汇测试的范本样本相比，普通词汇的增长大大加快了，而定性的结果则说明了学生对词汇教学的参与和老师的扩展视觉和词汇教学技巧。