It's all words

I just put in a proposal for a coaching gig with a medium-size charter school to re-orient their English Language Arts (ELA) program to one based on and around vocabulary development. Why, you ask? Well, it's a good idea and it integrates all the important elements of ELA.

So where would I start? As always, I would start with first principles and discussions around defining and agreeing on common language. For example, I use the terms "high frequency" and "high value" vocabulary to describe what I want in terms of program objectives and what is important to students and their lives and realities, and can be predicted, respectively. I also use "unpredictable" or "random" for those words and phrases which just appear out of the blue, for example because of a current Tiktok or popular song. Vocabulary development planning can then take into account these three categories.

Another term is of course "vocabulary" itself. (I find the Americanism "vocabulary words" hilarious and have done my fruitless best to eliminate its use.) I like to use the term "item" and to include words, word families, phrases, prepositional and phrasal verbs and even collocations. 

An interesting discussion is how many vocabulary items are represented by the numbers 1 - 100. A hundred, right? So 1 - 1000 would mean a thousand? And a student who can count to one billion clearly knows a billion words ...

Is "look up" as in look + direction the same as "look in" "look left" and "look right"? What about "look up" as in research, "look for" as in seek or "look down on"?

This leads into discussing what is simple and what is complex, and what is right for G1 versus what is for G4 and G8. Cat and catty? Faith and infidelity? Anti and antidisestablishmentarianism?

I also like to maintain that ELA has essentially no contents, being a collection of skills, and so therefore its contents should come from other subject areas. For example, G1 gives us "Me and my family" and G4 sharks and volcanoes. Choosing the topics and then the order of the topics leads naturally to the vocabulary items to be developed.

And finally, for this post, I also like to ask about target numbers, for example G1 students should have a  vocabulary of xxx items and those in G8 yyy items. This discussion links to reading or lexile levels, CEFR, and to productive and receptive vocabularies. Standardized tests and SATs are also a part of the conversation.

I hope I am successful in the bid as this would be an interesting project. 

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