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Building Vocabulary (AIR New Activity 3 for Read Aloud)

AIR Additional Supports Develop student’s background knowledge through shared interactive reading of text.

AIR Instructions for Teachers Focus on Words: Students are pretaught words that are important for understanding the text, frequent across content areas, and abstract. Words that are essential for understanding paragraph 1 are criticism, misunderstanding, tangible, and sayable (as well as unsayable). In this passage, the word tangible is the only word on the Academic Word List. Use extended instructional techniques to pre-teach these words. Other words are identified for instruction because they are frequent in the text and critical to understanding main ideas, although they tend to be less abstract. Provide students with a glossary for these words (see the example that follows). As students encounter the words during close reading, they rewrite them in their journal. For homework, they are asked to find examples from the text, draw pictures or provide brief definitions, and indicate whether the words are cognates (for students whose home language shares cognates with English). During this component and prior to the close read, read the text aloud (or have students read the text with a partner); briefly elaborate on glossed definitions for words that might need more explication, and use second-language teaching techniques (gestures, pointing to pictures, translation) to clarify word meanings. Also give students opportunities to apply word-learning strategies they have acquired to figure out word meanings they do not know. Last, it is important that students have versions of the text with glossed words underlined.