Caroline Goldberg
Mr. Webb
Saturday January 26th 2013
In a recent study conducted on kindergarten children a new theory has been proven to be true. It is now a fact that teaching kids general, not challenging vocab words in the early years of life effect their growing vocab as older children and teenagers. When teachers give their students not challenging vocab words and do not thoroughly teach the definition of the word, the kids miss patterns in words and don't learn the full definition of important words. Tanya Wright also says that there is not enough vocabulary in elementary school and it is not stressed as much as it should be. She also says that under-privileged children that do not go to a successful school start out with 10,000 words less than children that go to a successful school.
article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130124134046.htm
I think this article and study could really change things in schools. If vocabulary is not stressed enough, the SAT english section could continue to be a problem in America. I think if vocabulary is stressed more as children, we would be more successful while reading complex literature.
Caroline this post is very interesting, but it raises many questions. One being, do you think it would be smart to take more time to teach kids challenging words with a solid definition? Would that take away time from mathematics or science, places we really lack compared to the rest of the world? Also, I do agree that vocabulary is important but I think there is a line we could draw as to how much more vocab our kids need to learn. But all in all, I do understand your point and see this topic as something more primary schools should be aware of.
ReplyDeleteIt is a very interesting blog ! I never know that not learning hard vocabularies in early years will affect their growing vocabularies in the future. I agree that vocab is extremely important and useful for us to write a deeper essay and deliver our information much clearer to others. But in fact, it is really hard to memorize the hard words that we don't use often, especially for the English language learners. I am wondering that what method will help us to learn those difficult and confusing vocab more effective. Studying more challenging vocab since we were little may help us to achieve more vocabularies when we grew up.
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