VOCABULARY THERESA DAVIS VOCABULARY Overview College students often

VOCABULARY THERESA DAVIS

VOCABULARY • Overview: • College students often feel so overwhelmed by the highly developed and often discipline-specific vocabulary encountered in college that they find it as difficult as reading a foreign language. • Texts written for academic purposes might assume that readers have a familiarity with the concepts and vocabulary of the discipline.

VOCABULARY • Texts written for academic purposes might assume that readers have a familiarity with the concepts and vocabulary of the discipline. • However, this is not always the case. • As students' studies progress, vocabulary can become so difficult that they struggle at the word level. • This prevents them from understanding the main ideas and concepts they should learn.

VOCABULARY • When struggling at the word level, looking up many unfamiliar words becomes a daunting and impractical task, just as it would be for the speaker of any "new" language. • Therefore, it is imperative that we provide students with strategies to better comprehend the vocabulary they will face.

VOCABULARY IMPROVING YOUR VOCABULARY • A good vocabulary is probably the single most important skill associated with good reading. • Every other skill—comprehension, retaining information, making inferences, drawing appropriate conclusions, evaluating—depends on whether you know what the words on the page mean in relation to each other and in their context.

VOCABULARY • Struggling readers are often unaware of vocabulary's importance to reading comprehension and therefore disregard unfamiliar terms.

VOCABULARY • This practice easily leads to misreading and confusion. • The strategies presented in this module aid in understanding specialized vocabulary and emphasize the importance of using context to improve reading comprehension. • This practice easily leads to misreading and confusion.

VOCABULARY • Our learning goals for this module are: • Students will learn why vocabulary building is important to strong reading comprehension. • Students will learn application strategies to emphasize the importance of understanding vocabulary for good reading comprehension.

VOCABULARY • Experiential Exercise: • One strategy for emphasizing the importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension is called a Cloze exercise.

VOCABULARY • This type of activity helps students internalize meanings by forcing them to focus on what is missing from one or more sentences.

VOCABULARY v. Reflect and Respond: v. After filling the missing vocabulary words in this passage, take a few moments to answer the following questions. v. How did you determine which missing word(s) to use in the blanks? v. How did selecting the word(s) improve your comprehension of the passage?

VOCABULARY • Compare your answers to the completed paragraph here: 3. 3 Forces on Fluids • In discussing the flow of water (or any other fluid), it is necessary to consider the forces acting on a fluid particle. These forces are usually divided into two classes, body forces and surface forces. Body forces are those that do not require direct contact with the fluid: they "act at a distance. " One body force that plays an important role in hydrological systems is gravitational attraction, the weight of the fluid. Another example of a body force is an electromagnetic force. Surface forces are those caused by direct contact between two fluid particles or between fluid and solid. The tangential force in the conceptual experiment we employed in defining viscosity is an example of a surface force--the dragging of the water along by the floating plate required the plate to be in contact with the fluid surface. A normal force is one oriented perpendicular to a surface. Instead of using surface forces directly we usually employ the concept of force per unit area or stress. There are two types of stresses that we consider influence mechanics--normal stresses and tangential stresses. The latter, as we have already seen, are termed shear stresses. The normal stress, when applied to a fluid medium, is referred to as pressure (p. 47). Passage from Hornberger, G. , Raffensperger, J. , Wiberg, P. , Eshleman, K. (1998. ) Elements of physical hydrology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

VOCABULARY • How this exercise will help you become a critical reader. • This fill-in-the-blank activity is one way to help students comprehend and develop the vocabulary within a discipline. • It accomplishes this by encouraging students to understand the importance of context and to value prior knowledge by utilizing a predictable or previously read text. • Cloze exercises can help students in any class become better acquainted with the discourse used by that field of study.

LETS MOVE AROUND A LITTLE • Go to the board and write your name and your favorite food.

USING THE DICTIONARY • Strategy #6: Using the dictionary • Are looking up words in a dictionary a sign of days gone by? Not when this can make a difference in vocabulary building! Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in dictionary research which suggests that readers who consult a dictionary tend to retain the word's meaning longer than contextual guessing.

• Strategy #6: Using the dictionary • Online dictionaries, such as dictionary. com, make looking up a word even simpler. So call up or dust those dictionaries off--it may be time to bring them back to the classroom. • Using a dictionary effectively is a metacognitive skill that helps students make strong connections to words. • Pointing out features beyond the definition is often an eyeopening experience. • Students should be encouraged to notice how words are formed and used as well as their histories and varieties across the ages.

DICTIONARY WEB SITES • • Online Dictionaries The computer revolution has extended to the world of dictionaries. As I am updating this list in the spring of 2011, these are the best known currently available online. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary www. merriam-webster. com The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language www. ahdictionary. com Webster’s New World College Dictionary www. yourdictionary. com The Free Dictionary www. freedictionary. com Each site works a little differently, and it is worth spending time with each one to see which best suits your needs.

DICTIONARY