Teaching Vocabulary: Are You Making These 5 Common Mistakes?

It’s Monday: time to learn a new list of twenty vocabulary words. The children look up the words in the dictionary and copy the definitions. Tomorrow they will use the words in a sentence, and on Wednesday they will complete a fill-in-the-blank worksheet. On Friday there will be a quiz on the twenty words.

Then it will be time to start all over again the next Monday.

Sound familiar? That is how many of us were taught vocabulary words. Even the most compliant kids groaned inwardly at this demotivating routine.

A large vocabulary is critical for reading comprehension, so we definitely want to include vocabulary development as part of our educational plans for our children. But we also want our efforts to be effective—the problem is that the list-on-Monday, test-on-Friday approach just doesn't work. 

Here are five mistakes commonly made when teaching vocabulary words:

1. Assigning too many new vocabulary words at one time
2. Teaching vocabulary words out of context
3. Expecting students to recall vocabulary words after a single exposure to the words
4. Making vocabulary development a boring topic that kids want to avoid
5. Skipping vocabulary development entirely.

So How DO You Teach Vocabulary, Then?

The best approach for improving vocabulary is to use a mix of activities and contexts that includes:

• direct instruction
• discussions about word usage and word parts
• repeated exposure to new words
• reading aloud and/or independent reading 

The truth is, most vocabulary is learned indirectly, through listening and speaking. So the more oral language experience children have, the more word meanings they learn—which in turn helps them build their vocabulary, especially when they are young.  

Have a question about teaching vocabulary? 

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