Using Technology to Aid Vocabulary Development in 3-5 Year Olds

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Using Technology to Aid Vocabulary Development in 3-5 Year Olds

by seecoo wu

 

There is great concern in this country right now over the significant numbers of students who have limited reading abilities. However, there is good evidence that this can be turned around with preventative teaching strategies that can be introduced when children are as young as three years old.

Vocabulary size has been found to be a key determinant in children's reading abilities and academic success (Dickinson, Cote and Smith, 1993). Although reading problems due to small vocabulary size often don't manifest themselves until the third grade (Chall and Jacobs, 1996), the lack of adequate vocabulary acquisition can be traced back to children's earliest years.

Recent research into vocabulary acquistion of children ages 3-5 years has shown that it is relatively simple to include teaching methods in the classroom and at home that dramatically improve the vocabulary of all children. Technology has the potential to be an important supplement to these teaching methods. This paper will look at teaching strategies suggested by the recent research and examine the effectiveness of one particular technology package based on the "Arthur" book series to support those teaching strategies. The "Arthur" technology package includes a daily television show, print books with audio cassette, video tapes, CD-Roms, and a Web site.

Research

Young children have the ability to learn a large number of words very quickly. From the age of 1 1/2 to 6, they learn an average of 9 words a day (Templin, 1957) that they pick up from the conversation around them, without explicit explanations (Rice & Woodsmall, 1988). Research shows that children learn words best when they have frequent exposure to the word (Drum and Konopak, 1987; Jenkins, Stein, and Wysocki, 1984; Rice, 1990; Sternberg, 1987), when there is rich information about the word's meaning near the word (Drum and Konopak, 1987; Rice, 1990; Sternberg, 1987), when they understand the complete passage in which the new word is located (Devilliers and Pomerantz, 1992; Drum and Konopak, 1987), and when they repeatedly encounter the word in the same grammatical context (Rice and Woodsmall, 1988).

However, even though the ability is there, the children need the exposure to the words in order to learn them. In studies based at home and in the classroom, researchers found that the two key elements that separated children with larger and smaller vocabularies were the amount of exposure they had to unfamiliar words and the extent to which they were involved with adults in analytical or cognitively challenging discussions (Beals, De Temple, and Dickinson, 1994; Dickinson, Cote and Smith, 1993, Dickinson and Smith, 1994, Snow, 1993). Analytical discussions were described as discussions where the children had to move away from simple facts to explanations, and to talk about cause and effect or complex ideas. In the classroom, the analytical discussions were often centered around a story the teacher was reading to the students. The students learned the most vocabulary when the unfamiliar vocabulary was first discussed and then the students moved away from a discussion of the immediate information in the story like - the boy's hat was blue - to an analysis of why the characters did what they did or to a retelling the story in their own words and making connections to their own lives.

Dickinson and Smith (1994) concluded that analytical discussions build vocabulary in the following ways:

1. The discussion of vocabulary gives the students an opportunity to hear the word repeatedly and processs it. The teacher often shows the children how to figure out the meaning of a word through picture clues, sentence context and story meaning

2. The students' retelling of the story helps the children have a more robust understanding and memory of the story which gives them a stronger conceptual base for the unfamiliar vocabulary,

3. The students' retelling of the story also gives the students a chance to use the unfamiliar vocabulary and make it more familiar.

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4. These types of discussions push children to more clearly articulate their thoughts and use new vocabulary.

They also speculated that the analytical discussions may also help children increase their vocabulary by helping them to become aware of their own metacognitive processes. The analytical approach to the text may teach students to distance themselves from the story and become aware of their own mental activity. Students may find that they notice words that they don't know more quickly than they did before, more likely to try to figure out the meanings of the words and more able to ...

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