What do teachers need to know about teaching vocabulary?

Tiffany Hogan: So when we want to think about teaching language explicitly, we want to think about how to directly call out language structures and make connections for children. So an example would be when you're teaching vocabulary. What we know about teaching vocabulary is we need very clear child-friendly definitions. We also need to teach vocabulary multisensory. So we write a new word down, we would want to say the meaning of the word, and we'd want to say the word out loud and think about the sounds in the word. We'd want to use the word in multiple different contexts or different sentences. And then what we'd want to do is encourage children to do the same. We also want to connect that new word to words they already know. So we're creating those, what we call semantic webs within their mental dictionary. And then we want children to become word detectives themselves.

So not only are they learning new words, but they have the skills to acquire new vocabulary. If they don't know a word, then they have an idea of what they can do to learn that word.