This article presents findings from an intervention across sixth and seventh grades to teach academic words to middle school students. The goals included investigating a progression of outcomes from word knowledge to comprehension and investigating the processes students use in establishing word meaning. Participants in Year 1 were two sixth-grade…

How can we supplement the limited time available for vocabulary instruction while motivating students to attend to the words they are learning? As a part of an academic word vocabulary intervention, we challenged sixth-grade students to find their words in the world around them. This activity, In the Media, garnered responses from 51 of the 61…

Hundreds of thousands of teachers have used this highly practical guide to help K-12 students enlarge their vocabulary and get involved in noticing, understanding, and using new words. Grounded in research, the book explains how to select words for instruction, introduce their meanings, and create engaging learning activities that promote both…

Responding to readers' stories, questions, and requests for extended examples, this book was developed as a complementary volume to "Bringing Words to Life." The authors present additional tools, tips, and explanations of such questions as which words to teach, when and how to teach them, and how to adapt instruction for English language learners.…

This article reports on 2 studies with kindergarten and first-grade children from a low-achieving elementary school that provided vocabulary instruction by the students' regular classroom teacher of sophisticated words (advanced vocabulary words) from children's trade books that are typically read aloud. Study 1 compared the number of…