Chapter 2

As I'm reading through this chapter I am slowly starting to connect the dots. "Every time I ask a group of teachers to examine the first pages of a classic and then ask them to describe the challenges this text poses for student, the first response is invariably 'vocabulary'." (pg 21) This is a major problem is high school classrooms today... and part of it can be contributed to teachers opting to erase canonical text and replacing them with young adult literature. Another part can be contributed to home life, where students do not read at home, therefore their vocabulary level is lower than those who do. I really liked the author's lesson of using the book mark as a tool for students to mark down words they do not know then going over them in class and in groups. This leads to multiple ideas and theories being completed at the same time. When students work individually they can begin building their own vocabulary with their struggles in finding the meaning of the mystery word. But then when going over the words in class, using methods of prefixes, suffixes, and roots and context clues they are beginning to break into the zone of proximal development by using things they have already learned to order to build their vocabulary. When it comes to "knowing" a word, I feel that a student does not need to be able to write out a dictionary definition, but be able to use the word in a sentence using context clues as a means of showing their knowledge of the word. Even when mother, father, and elementary teachers read to their young children, the child understands what is happening in the story and maybe without even getting a clear and concise meaning of the word.