Research Proposal

The final piece I need to complete for my EMWP insitute is a brief proposal for research that I intend to to during the 2010-2011 school year. Of the myriad of areas I need to improve my teaching, I have grown most concerned with their reading comprehension due to poor vocabulary. I want to improve how I help my students learn new and relevant vocabulary.

Hamtramck High School is certainly one of the most unique places I have ever been. Sixty percent of the students speak English as a second language. The majority of all students receive free and reduced lunch. We know that numbers like this usually equate to lower literacy rates. Not only are students like mine less likely to read often, they are also more likely to have a substantially smaller vocabulary. This past school year, I found myself really struggling with ways to handle vocabulary instruction. This struggle was not a new one, by any means. I, however, think that I found more urgency in the matter because my school was facing the prospect of not achieving AYP for the seventh year in a row. In order for students to pass the state mandated tests, they had to become better readers. In order to become better readers, they need to expand their vocabulary. Additionally, I had the privilege of teaching AP Literature and Composition for the first time. The level of vocabulary needed by students to succeed in this class was significantly higher than any other class I have taught.

As the end of the school year approached, I scoured catalogs, hoping to find that magic vocabulary bullet that would help my students. Of course, the program would be simple to use and the students would feel inspired while working their way through the material. Each teacher was given 100 dollars to spend and that was not going to cover a complete set of vocabulary workbooks. Frustration set in and in June I didn't know what I was going to do. Thankfully, the EMPW reminded me that there is research that addressed many issues like vocabulary and that it doesn't take that much time to look into the trouble spots in my classroom.

As I began the research into vocabulary instruction, it was immediately clear that buying a "magic workbook" was not an effective means to improve student vocabulary. In Classroom Instruction that Works, Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock cite Nagy and Herman's (1987) alternative to word lists: more reading.

If students were to spend 25 minutes a day reading at a rate of 200 words per
minute for 200 days out of the year, they would read a million words of text
annually. According to our estimates, with this amount of reading, children
will encounter between 15,000 and 30,000 unfamiliar words. If one in 20 of
these words is learned, the yearly gain will be between 750 and 1,500 words (124).

This sounds like a reasonable goal for a teacher. I know that I cannot carve out 25 minutes for reading everyday in the class; it is possible, however, to make sure that more reading is assigned for homework. On the surface, this appears to mean more work to collect from students. Many of my students won't do homework for credit, I can see many of them not putting forth any effort on reading for reading's sake. Initially, written assignments for each reading assignment might be necessary.

Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock do not completely rule out the usefulness in directly teaching vocabulary. They present five ideas for teachers to remember when teaching vocabulary:
1. Students need to see a word in context more than one time in order to learn it.
2. Direct instruction about the word improves learning.
3. Associate new words with pictures
4. Word lists do work (note to self, find those catalogs).
5. Directly teach words as related to new content. (124-28)

To address all of these aspects, I will need to make some wholesale changes in my classroom.

I teach American Literature to tenth grade students. Many of the difficult vocabulary words that my students will encounter in short stories and poems are likely to be one-time encounters. I think that in order to help students process and learn those words, I will ask them to create pictures with those story related vocabulary. I will also preview the words before reading the story or poem, in order to directly teach new content words.

In her book Words, Words, Words Janet Allen cites Simmons and Kameenui who tell us that students need to use words frequently if they are going to remember them properly. That means that I will have to ensure that the words we study implicitly as vocabulary will have to be revisited through out the year. List of words will likely be posted around the room. When the opportunity arises in class discussions, the list can serve as prompts both for students and me. I hope that just having the words around and highly visible will encourage students to use new and more advanced words.

I believe that my students will also keep a readers notebook. One section will be dedicated to vocabulary. In this section, students will keep track of troublesome words. I haven't yet determined what will be done with those personal lists. It is likely that students will have to make pictures related to at least some of their words.

In order to gauge my students' growth, I believe that the students will take a vocabulary assessment during the first week of school. This will give me some baseline data and perhaps the first vocabulary list that will be implicitly taught. At the beginning of the second semester, students will take another assessment in order to monitor how much students have learned in the the first semester. Students will take a final vocabulary assessment during June, just before finals. I hope to find that my students will have shown measurable growth since September.

I am looking forward to implementing these changes in my class. Starting the research process has sparked my imagination and has given me a more optimistic outlook on the coming school year.


Resources Cited

Words, Words, Words, Allen, Janet. Stenhouse Publishers: Portland, Maine. 1999.

Classroom Instruction that Works, Marzano, Robert J. et al. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development: Alexandria, Virginia. 2001.