#197: Writing Goals for Vocabulary (Part 2)

Marisha (00:00)

Hey, it's Marisha and we are continuing our series on vocabulary. I'm really excited. So last week we talked about earlier, more foundational vocabulary goals. And today we're continuing the conversation and talking about more complex vocabulary goals and I'm really excited. So let's go ahead and dive right in. So this is, and we talked about this

last week, but students' comprehension improves if they are taught keywords prior to reading, especially when it comes to like tier two words. I've read research and in my personal experience, I found that this doesn't apply as much to like basic concepts and categories, object functions, more of that foundational vocabulary because they kind of, if they don't have that very base vocabulary,

We don't really have words to define it for them and it just, it works out better if they can experience it. but with tier two words, when we're working on those skills, students already have that foundational vocabulary and they have words to understand other words. So I think to me, that's how I rationalize why that makes sense. so yes, we found that comprehension improves if we pre-teach vocabulary words.

And I have an experience when I was a few years into being at an SLP, I was using a reading passage with some of my sixth graders. And it was a passage that we pulled from the classroom. It was a forensic science article. And I was really excited that I was just using anything from the curriculum. And we did.

We just dove in, we read the article, and then we did some comprehension activities. And this article included a lot of really great vocabulary words like suspect and investigate and evidence. And I didn't think to check to make sure that students understood these key words. And there, you might not be surprised.

but they didn't have, like their comprehension was not great. And when I was like, hmm, I wonder what happened. Cause they were super engaged in the reading. Like, why don't they comprehend this? When I did a probe to see if they understood the vocabulary, they didn't. And that was the missing component. And that really impacted their comprehension. And so that was a learning experience for me.

as a younger SLP, and that might have been obvious to you from the start, but that experience really stuck with me and I was like, okay, let's pre-teach our vocabulary before we dive into an article. And it's just as a really nice strategy. And if we are, so for using the approach where we pre-teach vocabulary words that are, and we select, like we identify the words that we want to target from a text.

We pre-teach them, and then we read the text. Students have multiple, like they are seeing those words in context multiple times. And last week we talked about how many meaningful exposures students need to master a vocabulary word and add it to their mental dictionary, so to speak. this is a really nice strategy that we can use when targeting.

This is jumping ahead because today we're talking about goals. But this information, this context is really important when we think about how we're writing goals. And there have been multiple studies where children have been able to learn and retain new vocabulary when we give them direct explanation, which we're doing when we're pre-teaching. And doing that,

increases, they're like they're more likely to actually learn those words if we pre-teach and give that direct explanation versus just giving them the opportunity to read those words in text. And last week we talked about how important that direct instruction of target vocabulary words is for our students because they struggle to learn those words indirectly and they really, really benefit from that direct exp-

exposure like that direct teaching and then they also need a larger number of exposures meaningful exposures than maybe their peers. So given that context and thinking about okay, so how do we use this to decide what types of goals we're targeting with our students or how we're writing and structuring our goals? We do want to look at

multiple data sources, and I say this multiple times every episode because it is so important. So we are often required to administer formal assessments and we have subtests that look at vocabulary skills and it's really easy to just look at those vocabulary subtests and write goals based on that. But we want to look at more than just that. We want to consider parent and teacher report.

Like, are they, are parents or teachers reporting difficulty with vocabulary or comprehension? Like, what are their types of, what concerns do they have? And could that be related to vocabulary? We might want to also implement some criterion referenced assessments, or we might want to do some probes or dynamic assessment based on the concerns that parents or teachers are bringing up.

and do some kind of sleuthing and investigating as to what could be the root cause to help us get like determine the most meaningful goal. And dynamic assessment can be particularly helpful because maybe vocabulary isn't the thing that students need. Like if they struggle with comprehension, maybe it's something different. So if we could do a comprehension activity,

without pre-teaching the vocabulary and see if teaching the vocabulary improves their performance. But maybe it's something else. Maybe it's like executive function, attention type of thing. But that dynamic assessment will give us some of that data in helping to determine the best course of action. And so that's why we want to collect those multiple sources of data. And of course, we want to be writing goals that

will actually help our students access their curriculum. So if it's not, if parents and teachers aren't reporting it as an area of concern, if their work samples look beautiful and they're doing really well on classroom-based activities and we observe them in the classroom and they seem to be doing really well, then maybe it doesn't.

Like we'd obviously want to consider it, but maybe the formal assessment results aren't very helpful. And maybe it's an indicator of something else, for example. So that's why we want to take those multiple pieces of data and kind of put it on our investigative hats to determine what the students actually need. So that's kind of our foundational discussion and some potential goal areas.

our affixes and I'm including, we're going to just touch on affixes really quickly and then we're going to spend the majority, like the rest of our time chatting about tier two words. Mostly because I've just found a lot more research around interventions for tier two words and it can be really impactful for our students. But.

We have.

So with affixes, so those are prefixes and suffixes. And this can be, and it might not work for every student, which is why we might want to do a little bit of dynamic assessment and consider other factors, whether this would be a good approach for students or not. I feel like this is a little bit more of a higher level goal. And we,

might want to start with two tier two words potentially. But I wanted to include this because there's apparently there are four prefixes and four suffixes that account for 90 % of affixed words. So we could in theory teach four prefixes and four suffixes

And that would help students break down like 97 % of the affixed words that they encounter like in the curriculum in their daily life. So for example, pre is one of those prefixes. And so if we can teach students, okay, pre means before. And this is how you identify

as a prefix in words, and this is how you can use it to determine what the word means, that can be a really powerful and impactful strategy. But it might require a little bit too much for some of our students, and it might be really difficult for them to actually use this, which is why I'm sometimes hesitant, but I've seen it be

really impactful and work really well for some students, which is why I want to share it. But if that is approach that we want to look at, like it makes a lot of sense and it's a little bit more concrete than like it's a little bit more of a helpful strategy potentially than like just using context clues. Although context clues might include looking at the word parts.

But it's a little bit less for students to manage because with context clues, we're thinking about a lot of different things. So yeah, but some goal areas that we might include are just being able to identify the parts of a word. So identifying prefixes and suffixes in a word, being able to state the meaning of a prefix and suffix, and maybe we would include the list of like, they can state the meaning of these eight.

prefixes and suffixes, although that is not super functional. That might be more of like a benchmark kind of thing. But then the more meaningful goal would be to state the meaning of an unknown word by using word parts. So students would learn to identify the prefix and the suffix potentially, and then use that to guess the meaning of the word.

could be a strategy that we look at. again, these are just goal stems. We would obviously want to add the baseline and the criterion and the duration and level of support and all of those types of things to make it an actually good goal. But that is something that we can do. And it might be helpful to identify the specific prefixes and or suffixes that we want to use.

just to have it be a little bit more of a specific goal. And then, so that's, I just wanted to touch on affixes briefly, but like I said, there's a lot more research around tier two words. And there's a lot of ways that we can approach this. And I, over the years, I've kind of become

a fan of really, really specific goals because our students don't always, like especially with vocabulary, it's difficult to see generalization. And so like in the previous episode, I talked about basic concepts and having a specific list of concepts that I want to target throughout the year. I feel like it makes my intervention more focused and intentional.

And then maybe we can have a list of generalization concepts too. But I feel like...

We just don't see a lot of generalization, especially with our students, because of all of the effects that we talked about. Like our students need direct exposure to words. They need that direct instruction, multiple, like 20, 30 plus meaningful exposures before they add that. So we have to be really, really intentional. And so I think selecting specific words.

is a really great strategy. And that's what they've been doing in the research as well. So I'm going to share two examples. So there was a study by Lohmann et al in 2018. And again, I'll share the link to the actual article in the show notes. You can find that at slpnow.com slash 197. And those are the digits. So 197.

They selected, so this was cool. Five kindergarten teachers selected 12 instructional verbs that they believe that students should know by the end of kindergarten. So some of those words were identify, predict, match, sort, illustrate. So these are the types of words that are coming up all of the time in directions. And the authors.

Like the researchers created four stories and each of the stories were intended to teach three of those instructional verbs. And they recruited preschoolers for a summer program. And then they did a book reading group versus their control group. And the book reading group had interactive reading experiences. They included

explicit instruction of the vocabulary words. They did definitions, all of that. And it was only three weeks of intervention. And the students in the book reading group learned significantly more verbs than the control group. And they maintained this advantage when they started school two months later. So this is a...

I thought this was really creative because they worked with the teachers to identify meaningful words and then they had really structured activities to teach those target words. And then, so that could just be a beautiful goal. Like if this were during summer school, like student will, whether like define 12 instructional verbs selected by the curriculum team or whatever.

And then you would attach a list of those words. You would get your baseline and then you would measure your progress by the end. throughout summer school or throughout your IEP year, you would target those words and make sure that students learn them. And then, I don't know, I just think that's so cool. So, it just makes a lot of sense for intervention and it's very intentional and very impactful because these words were selected by the teachers.

And if you're working with kindergartners, this would be a great list of words to use. Like I said, some examples were identify, predict, match, sort. Even with first graders and second graders, that could be a really helpful list of vocabulary words to target. But you can mimic this model.

whether you're working with kindergartners or 12th graders and use a similar approach where you select the words that are going to be really important in the curriculum and then teach them. And as we're doing that, because it can be a little bit, I've struggled because it sounds really nice to, like we want to teach students to fish and I want to teach them like,

big skills that will impact them and that they can use across all the things. But the vocabulary research is telling us that our students need that direct instruction and we need to teach them words directly. And so we might as well just be picking, selecting words that are going to have an impact and be meaningful. And that's, there's tons of research that can still be done to

can really determine what those words are. But if we can be really thoughtful about the words that we're targeting, and we can target them in a really strategic way, I think that's really, I don't know, it's just a really nice way to structure intervention. And then, okay, one more example. This is from Spencer et al. 2023, but they did something similar.

If you've probably heard of Story Champs, but it's a narrative intervention program. They developed 24 new stories. The stories were each about 100 words long. They included all of the central story grammar elements. And then they each story included two intentionally woven in academic vocabulary words. And there are lists out there of tier two vocabulary words by grade.

So if you're considering writing a goal in this way, you could just search for a list and pick the words that you think make sense. But I think it is really meaningful if you can do it like the Lohman et al article and work with the teachers to select those words. But this could be really cool. I was working with a group of second grade teachers, and they had a professional

like their yearly professional goal was to really improve math board problems. And there's common words that continue to come up in those activities. And that would have been so meaningful if I had come up with a list of words and wrote a goal to teach the students those words. But we can get strategic in how we select the words, whether it's super easy or collaborating with the team. Anyway, back to the study.

So they included two target words in each story. And they did this with first graders, but they had structured discussions about the words. And then they had at least eight opportunities to practice each word. And they did this by describing pictures, retelling the story, telling a personal story, using the new words. And they included, the article goes into a lot more detail on the prompting and support.

But they found that all students who participated in the intervention improved measures of immediate word learning as well as retention of those words. So again, these are just some studies to look at for inspiration if you're thinking about writing goals in this way. But there's some really compelling data and yeah, I think it's a really, especially for picking tier two vocabulary words.

These are words that are going to come up through the student's entire school experience. And we can continue to add on more and more words. And by teaching them these words, hopefully they're able to master more complex words as we go. And as we're teaching them these words, there are some incidental learning, there are learning strategies and all of that. It's not, we're not.

just teaching those words. They are learning strategies as we go along. yeah, hopefully that helps a little bit if you're feeling overwhelmed by the goal setting process. But just a quick recap. we, an example of a goal could be to define X number of words and include a list, like attach it to the IEP. And if you

Like if you're working with kindergartners, borrow that, those 12 instructional verbs. That's beautiful and that's perfect. And then just target those goals throughout the year or target those words. and that would be beautiful, but you can do that with math vocabulary words, or maybe you're partnering with the social studies or science or whatever the using that to determine those word lists and then

strategically targeting them throughout your units. And then you're off to the races. then, yeah. So that's, I'll include a written version of this again in the show notes at slpnow.com slash 197. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll see you next week as we dive into grammar.