What Reading Research Tells Us About Children with Diverse Learning Needs by Simmons Deborah C. Kameenui Edward J

Author:Simmons, Deborah C.,Kameenui, Edward J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135686505
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

AREA OF CONVERGENCE 5:

Reading Achievement and Vocabulary Acquisition

The fifth and final area of convergence in research on vocabulary development is that students need to develop strong beginning reading skills to be able to engage successfully in the volume of reading necessary for them to learn large numbers of word meanings through reading connected text (Anderson & Nagy, 1991). The only realistic chance students with poor vocabularies have to catch up to their peers with rich vocabularies requires that they engage in extraordinary amounts of independent reading. Furthermore, research finding are increasingly clear that opportunities for developing adequate reading skills are limited. In fact, the status quo in beginning reading instruction may be entirely insufficient to meet the reading and vocabulary needs of many diverse learners (Adams, 1990; Liberman & Liberman, 1990). For example, according to Juel’s (1988) longitudinal study, there was an 88% chance that a poor reader at the end of first grade would remain a poor reader at the end of fourth grade. Stanovich (1986) explained how the development of strong beginning reading skills facilitated vocabulary growth, which in turn facilitated the further increases in reading. This reciprocal, causal relation between reading and vocabulary seems to continue unabated throughout development.

The amount of independent reading that diverse learners need to engage in to reduce the vocabulary gap that separates them from normal achieving peers is extensive. Researchers generally agree that students do learn word meanings in the course of reading connected text, but the process appears to be very time consuming (Baumann & Kameenui, 1991; Beck & McKeown, 1991). That is, students have to engage in considerable amounts of reading to be exposed to unknown words a sufficient number of times for them to be learned.

Beck and McKeown (1991) asserted that “research spanning several decades has failed to uncover strong evidence that word meanings are routinely acquired from context” (p. 799). Their conclusion was that some learning from context does occur, but that the effect is not very powerful. A number of other studies have examined the effects of learning words through normal reading activities (incidental learning). For example, Jenkins, Stein, and Wysocki (cited in Beck & McKeown, 1991) studied the effects of learning words in context with fifth-grade students. The contexts were created so that a word’s meaning was either strongly implied or a synonym was provided. Jenkins et al. found that students learned the meaning of words that had been encountered 6 or 10 times, unless exposure to meaning occurred prior to passage reading, in which case two encounters were sufficient to produce positive effects. Nagy, Herman, and Anderson (cited in Beck & McKeown, 1991) calculated that the probability of learning a word from a single contextual encounter was between .05 and .11, depending on the learning criterion used.

Oetting et al. (1995) investigated incidental word learning in the context of verbal stimuli. They investigated the likelihood that 6-, 7-, and 8-year-old children with and without disabilities would learn the meanings of 20 experimental words, each presented five times in the course of two, 6-minute videotaped stories.

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