The Role of Vocabulary Instruction in Adult Basic Education

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The Role of Vocabulary Instruction in Adult Basic Education

Mary E. Curtis

My goal in this chapter is to review theory and practice related to vocabulary learning in adult literacy learners and to draw some implications for research, policy, and practice. Vocabulary-- the extent of one's knowledge of word meanings--has long been recognized as a key factor in reading comprehension (Davis, 1944). Vocabulary knowledge has also been identified as one of the most significant variables in the reading success of minority language learners (Fitzgerald, 1995). Given the central role of vocabulary in reading, along with the large percentage of Englishlanguage learners enrolled in ABE programs, it is surprising how few studies have focused on vocabulary acquisition and instruction in adult literacy learners.1 However, a much more extensive body of work describes

1Among the nearly 900 journal articles listed in ERIC that deal with reading/literacy in adult basic education, only 24 (about 3%) focus on vocabulary. Such a small number does not necessarily indicate less awareness about the importance of vocabulary in ABE, as less than 4% of the articles about reading/literacy in secondary education focus on vocabulary. Similarities in relative emphasis aside, however, more than 400 journal articles have been published about vocabulary at the secondary level.

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the vocabulary knowledge and skills of children and young adults, along with information about the factors that seem to influence vocabulary growth (e.g., see Baumann, Kame'enui, & Ash, 2003; National Reading Panel, 2000; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). As a point of departure, therefore, I rely on this research to identify trends in theory, research, and vocabulary practices that hold promise for adult literacy learners.2 For purposes of this discussion, unless otherwise noted, I use "adult literacy learners" to refer to all adults--those who are learning to read in their native language as well as those who are English-language learners.

THE LINK BETWEEN VOCABULARY AND COMPREHENSION

Vocabulary and reading comprehension are highly correlated (about r = .75 for 14-year-olds and r = .66 for 17-year-olds), making vocabulary among the best single predictors of comprehension (Thorndike, 1973). This finding is true for children and, although we have no empirical data to prove this, we can assume that it is true for adults as well. A variety of hypotheses have been offered to explain the correlation (e.g., see Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Mezynski, 1983; and Ruddell, 1994). Each explanation suggests a very different avenue for vocabulary instruction. In this first section, four of these hypotheses are introduced, and the potential relationships that exist among them during acquisition of reading skills are discussed. In the sections that follow, issues of how and what vocabulary should be taught are addressed in more detail.

Two of the hypotheses posit a causal relationship between vocabulary and comprehension. According to the first hypothesis, the extent of one's knowledge of word meanings directly affects how much is understood. Because vocabulary controls comprehension, to improve understanding it is necessary to increase the number of word meanings that are known. This hypothesis is often referred to as the instrumental hypothesis (Anderson & Freebody, 1981).

A second hypothesis contends that comprehension ability affects vocabulary size. The more opportunities provided for reading, the better one is at understanding what is read, and the better one is at understanding, the more likely new word meanings will be learned. In other words, improve-

2 See Gillespie (2001) and Kruidenier (2002) for examples of how this approach has been used previously to inform overviews of adult literacy research and practice.

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ment in vocabulary is a consequence--not a cause -- of comprehension. I refer to this as the byproduct hypothesis. (See Ruddell, 1994, for a similar explanation--one she calls "a comprehension-process view.")

Two other hypotheses about the relationship between vocabulary and comprehension point to their link with a third factor. The first such hypothesis suggests that vocabulary and comprehension are correlated because both are connected to the extent of background knowledge a reader has about what is being read. Once a relevant knowledge base has been built, both vocabulary and comprehension will be improved. This is commonly known as the knowledge hypothesis (Anderson & Freebody, 1981).

According to a fourth hypothesis, vocabulary and comprehension are related because both reflect an individual's overall competence with language. As learners develop linguistically, their vocabulary and comprehension abilities improve. This I refer to as the language proficiency hypothesis. (See Stahl, 1999, for a description of a somewhat related view, one that accounts for the relationship between vocabulary and comprehension in terms of their relationship to "general ability," or intelligence.)

Hypotheses like these are important because one's view about the nature of the relationship between vocabulary and comprehension has implications for instruction. For instance, if the instrumental hypothesis is correct, comprehension should be improved by teaching word meanings. If any of the other hypotheses are correct, however, word-meaning instruction will not in itself improve comprehension. Instead, instruction focusing more directly on promoting linguistic knowledge and use (language proficiency hypothesis), or increasing topical knowledge (knowledge hypothesis), or providing opportunities for understanding (byproduct hypothesis) would improve reading.

Studies conducted with students in Grades K?12 support each of these hypotheses, leading the RAND Reading Study Group to conclude that:

the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and comprehension is extremely complex, confounded as it is by the complexity of relationships among vocabulary knowledge, conceptual and cultural knowledge, and instructional opportunities. (RAND, 2002, p. 35)

Complex as the relationship may be, however, there is reason to believe that these hypotheses may be -- to some extent, at least -- developmentally related. That is, all of them may in fact be "true," but at different points in reading development.

Consider the situation for children just beginning to read. By the end of the primary grades, children can decode and understand about 3,000

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words, although they recognize the meaning of about 9,000 words when heard (Chall, 1983). Young children who are learning to read are much better at listening comprehension than they are at reading comprehension. Moreover, at this age, the extent of oral language experience still has a sizeable impact on growth in knowledge of word meanings and ability to understand (Biemiller, 1999). For adults at this stage of reading development (learning to decode), the language proficiency hypothesis seems to be the best explanation for the correlation between vocabulary and comprehension.

Once children have learned to decode, the number of words that they can read and understand begins to affect directly their ability to comprehend (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; Chall, Jacobs, & Baldwin, 1990). At this point in reading development, vocabulary takes on a causal role in reading comprehension. To improve their comprehension ability, adults at this stage must acquire new vocabulary knowledge (i.e., the instrumental hypothesis).

By middle school, the extent to which children have been exposed to written language becomes a significant factor in their vocabulary growth (McBride-Chang, Manis, Seidenberg, Custodio, & Doi, 1993; Nagy, Anderson, & Herman, 1987). What has been comprehended as a result of wide and varied reading determines opportunities for incidental learning from context, a situation consistent with the byproduct hypothesis. Adults at this stage need to read many different types of text, and read more.

By adolescence, the conceptual knowledge readers have about topics has an increasingly greater influence on how well they understand and acquire new concepts from what they read (Bulgren, Deshler, Schumaker, & Lenz, 2000). As school-related content-area reading tasks increase, background knowledge assumes an increasingly important role in the ability to understand the link between vocabulary and comprehension (i.e., the knowledge hypothesis). Adults at this stage must use reading to learn.

In adult literacy learning research, less curiosity about the nature of the relationship between vocabulary and comprehension is apparent than in the K?12 literature. Even so, connections with each of the aforementioned hypotheses can be found. For instance, approaches to adult reading instruction that emphasize the use of personal experiences and listening, speaking, and writing (Taylor, 1992) would seem to be based on the language proficiency hypothesis.

The view that vocabulary enables comprehension (the instrumental hypothesis) seems to be the basis for recommendations that vocabulary

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words should be taught to adult English-language learners "roughly in order of their frequency of occurrence, with high frequency words being learned first" (Laufer & Nation, 1999, p. 35).

Other second-language researchers such as Singleton (1999) argue that vocabulary is best taught not as knowledge of individual word meanings but through instruction in comprehension of the context in which word meanings are integrated (the byproduct hypothesis). Reading comprehension's impact on vocabulary growth may also help to explain why, by the time the fifth-grade reading level is reached, the extent of vocabulary knowledge of ABE students is no greater than children who read at the same level (Greenberg, Ehri, & Perin, 1997).

The notion that domain knowledge influences the ability to comprehend and acquire new vocabulary (the knowledge hypothesis) would seem to be the foundation for content-based approaches to literacy development in adults. According to Sticht (1997), for example, young adults in a remedial reading program who lacked knowledge relevant to what they were reading required an 11th-grade "general reading" ability to comprehend with 70% accuracy. However, when learners had high amounts of knowledge about what they were reading, they were able to comprehend with 70% accuracy with only sixth-grade "general reading" ability.

More research is needed to establish how the relationship between vocabulary and comprehension might differ in adults learning to read from the relationship for children learning to read, and whether the relationship changes for adults as reading ability develops. What is evident at present is that one's view about the nature of the relationship has significant implications for practice, affecting what the focus of vocabulary instruction will be, as well as what ultimately is learned. Research on these topics is examined in the next sections.

SOURCES OF VOCABULARY LEARNING

Although relatively little has been written about vocabulary learning for ABE students, several aspects of vocabulary have been suggested as important for instruction within the literatures on K?12 students and second-language learners. Three of these aspects have to do with sources of vocabulary learning. The first concerns the use of context -- recognizing clues that signal the meaning of unknown words, as well as the words that can signal relationships among ideas in a text. A second aspect involves

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the use of morphology -- identifying word parts that can be used in making inferences about the meaning of unknown words. A third is concerned with word definitions--understanding what they consist of and producing them.

Contextual Analysis

Virtually every discussion of vocabulary instruction for struggling readers includes recommendations for teaching students how to use context and word parts to figure out the meaning of unknown words. Techniques like these make sense, particularly given the consensus that most of the word meanings we know have been acquired incidentally, using context and morphemic/structural analysis while we read (Graves & WattsTaffe, 2002; Stahl, 1999). Aside from a logical connection, however, little research exists to support the assumption that specific instruction in teaching students how to use word and context clues is beneficial for increasing students' vocabulary size.

Contextual analysis refers to use of the syntactic and semantic clues found in context to derive word meanings. For instance, notice how the comparison used in the following sentence could help a reader determine something about the meaning of the underlined word: Mary's quietness was in sharp contrast to Mike's vociferousness. A number of clues of this sort have been identified (e.g., see Johnson & Pearson, 1984), and training in how to use and apply them can lead to improvements in an adult's ability to learn word meanings from context (Sternberg, 1987).

Outside of the laboratory, however, the kinds of texts used in school, as well as those that readers encounter in everyday life, do not always afford the opportunity to use contextual clues successfully because sentences do not always offer clear clues to meaning (Beck, McKeown, & McCaslin, 1983; Schatz & Baldwin, 1986). Moreover, vocabulary instruction that focuses on context can be especially problematic for students who have reading difficulties. In order to improve vocabulary using these techniques, students must have a base of word meanings on which to build and the ability to recognize and use the context clues expressed in what is read. Like their younger counterparts, less-skilled adolescent and adult readers have without a doubt acquired much knowledge about word meanings via incidental encounters with words in context. Frequently, however, their base of word knowledge is tied to specific contexts and characterized by experiences with words that tend to be aural in nature, rather than written. Consider, for example:

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. . . the man who assumed that beneficial must have something to do with money because he remembered that there used to be a company called "Beneficial Finance." Or the teen who defined ancestor as "one of your relatives who you don't see too much." Or the student who said a controversy was "something to do with government." Or the one who said about desist, "My high school teacher used to say that--cease and desist--I think it means sit down, shut up, and pay attention." (Curtis, 1997, pp. 81?82)

Kuhn and Stahl (1998) analyzed the results from 14 studies designed to teach students how to derive meaning from context. Their conclusion was that providing learners with opportunities to engage in wide and varied reading at a challenging level is as effective in building vocabulary as instruction with context clues per se.

Still another way in which contextual analysis is involved in word knowledge and text comprehension is via the category of words known as signal words. Signal words, such as similarly and nevertheless, help point out the connections among ideas in a text. Understanding (and use) of signal words improves steadily throughout adolescence (Nippold & Schwarz, 1992), although many less-skilled readers do not realize any benefit from them, either because they fail to attend to them, or because they fail to understand their meaning (Harris & Sipay, 1990).

In its review of studies of vocabulary instruction at the K?12 level, the National Reading Panel made little if any reference to signal words and their instruction. However, in the area of writing, teaching students to use signal words to combine sets of sentences into increasingly complex structures has been shown to improve the quality of their written products (see Hillocks & Smith, 2003 for a review). Comprehension may be improved by a similar instructional approach, particularly for students who lack understanding of the textual "road map" provided by this category of words. Signal words also occur quite frequently over a wide range of academic texts, making them good candidates for instructional focus with learners seeking to improve their content-area literacy skills (Coxhead, 2000).

In summary, the limitations in vocabulary knowledge and weaknesses in comprehension characteristic of learners who struggle with reading often prevent much growth in word meanings via a contextual approach (Curtis & Longo, 1999). In particular, less-skilled readers have been shown to have a tendency to focus too narrowly on some aspects of the context while missing others, and to have problems separating the meaning of the context from the meaning of the word itself (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002; Curtis, 1987). Instead, reading widely -- especially materials that include challenging words--may be a more effective approach

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for incorporating context in vocabulary learning. In addition, instructional focus on those words that have meaning within the context of other words--signal words--may improve comprehension and written expression (see also Tuley, 1998).

Morphological Knowledge and Skills

As grade level increases, instances of basic morpheme patterns (i.e., prefixes, suffixes, roots) of Latin and Greek origin become more frequent in content-area textbooks. These tend to be patterns that older students with reading difficulties are unfamiliar with, both because they lack knowledge of the meanings of word parts and because they have had limited experience using the parts they know as a way to derive the meaning of unfamiliar words (Henry, 1999, 2003).

Knowledge of common English suffixes (such as -tion, -ment, and -less) grows considerably between fourth grade and high school, and is related to reading comprehension in children (Nagy, Diakidoy, & Anderson, 1993) and in adult English-language learners (Qian, 1999). Children's awareness of the structure of words also seems to be significantly related to their ability to define them (Carlisle, 2000), although many high school students remain unaware of how word parts can help in deriving meaning (Stahl, 1999). Success in reading is also tied to the ability to use clues to meaning found when words from different languages share the same or similar form and have at least one sense in common (i.e., cognates). For instance, bilingual Hispanic children who varied in their proficiency in reading English also varied in the extent to which they took advantage of cognates as aids in comprehension (Garcia, 1991).

Not surprisingly, then, vocabulary instruction that teaches the meaning of common roots, prefixes, and affixes as an aid in determining the meaning of words is recognized as a basic instructional method in a number of texts written for practitioners (e.g., see Blachowicz & Fisher, 2002; Stahl, 1999), as well as in reviews of vocabulary research studies (e.g., see the report of the National Reading Panel, 2000). What is surprising, however, is the paucity of research evidence supporting the effectiveness of morphemic analysis instruction as a way to improve vocabulary and comprehension (Baumann et al., 2002). In part, this may be because studies of morphemic analysis instruction have tended to be short-term, limiting their impact to a study of the transfer of the particular roots and affixes taught, rather than allowing for a long-term assessment of the value of morphemic

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