Vocabulary Guide

Vocabulary is vital to supporting the work students do in our courses. While it may seem simple or elementary, without a solid grasp of vocabulary, we create a barrier to a student’s accessing, understanding, and applying the knowledge they need to do the work of a historian. A routine focus on vocabulary is a small practice that will go a very long way.

But how do we teach vocabulary in a way that makes it memorable and useful? Vocabulary practice has to include more than just a list of words students memorize. These words represent big (and sometimes medium-sized) concepts critical to the unit, to the lesson, and to the individual readings and videos. And, it turns out, just memorizing the definition doesn’t always help students understand what a word means. To really understand and be able to use a word, you need to see the word in a variety of contexts.

Also, it’s not just about ensuring your students are learning the words. It’s about you—and your students—identifying which words they should learn. You’ll find vocabulary words at the beginning of each lesson that we think are vital to understanding the content, and that might also be unfamiliar to a lot of students. However, this approach won’t meet the needs of every student. As with everything we do, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Regardless of what’s in the course glossary, the words your students are familiar with will differ from student to student, class to class, and year to year. There is no way you can track those differing and ever-changing needs. This creates the perfect opportunity for students to take some responsibility for their own vocab needs.

Teaching Vocab Strategies

• Address multiple-meaning words—For multiple-meaning words (for example, party, revolution, and mine) go over all definitions, part of speech, and usage with students.


• Teach vocabulary thematically—Create concept webs with students for vocabulary related to a certain theme or topic. For example, if students are learning about the Agricultural Revolution, place the topic in the middle and have all associated words posted around it. Students can have a version in a corresponding graphic organizer or anchor chart in either paper or digital form.


• Focus on parts of words—Review common roots, prefixes, suffixes, and the like. Breaking down words into smaller pieces can increase the level of comprehensible input and will prepare students to recognize more complex words in the future.


• Use multiple representations of vocabulary—As students learn new vocabulary, have them record it—either on paper or digitally—using a standardized format to cement understanding. For example, a vocabulary “notebook” may contain the word, definition, example and non-example, and illustration (as in the Frayer Model), or may contain the word, definition, and a sentence.


• Practice context clues routines—Have students practice inferring the meaning of an unknown word by using the words around it and the context of the text.


• Use multimodal vocabulary practice—Reinforce vocabulary through multiple modes—for example, drawing, acting out, using in sentences, and total physical response (TPR). In TPR, students act out a concept with either a body movement or hand motion.


• Reinforce vocabulary multiple times—Throughout your class, use the new academic or content vocabulary as you speak, and have students signal when they hear new vocabulary words used. This can be made into a game or competition. In addition, students can highlight or track the vocabulary words as they appear in an article.


• Compile student-driven personal dictionaries—Encourage students to compile dictionaries containing new and significant terms—these can include general academic vocabulary, content-specific vocabulary, or interpersonal, social language they hear from their peers or teachers. Depending on a student’s proficiency level, the format of this dictionary could vary, but should include the word, its definition, an example, a sentence, or an illustration, and, if applicable, a translation into the student’s home language. This encourages metacognition and is a way for students to monitor their language acquisition as it happens organically.


• Compose and decompose words—Teach students to analyze word structures, such as compound words, prefixes, roots, and suffixes, to decompose words into meaningful components.


• Teach cognates explicitly—Have students make the connection between words that are similar in their first language. This will help them solidify the concept in both languages.


• Include nominalizations of vocabulary words—Nominalizations are nouns or noun phrases created from verbs or adjectives. For example, when “evolve” becomes “evolution,” “expand” becomes “expansion,” and “applicable” becomes “applicability,” the words are undergoing nominalization. Verb-noun nominalizations tend to have the most variation in the root word, and students may not automatically make the connections.