Introduction
Helping culturally diverse learners become conscious of the power of building, constructing, and sustaining a personal storehouse of words and vocabularies is the end goal of vocabulary teaching and learning in language arts. When learners become comfortable and competent in recognizing and knowing when, where, why, and how words work and understand how to use them in and out of context, they begin to build powerful and flexible vocabularies–storehouses or banks of words. A strong bank and storehouse of words provides culturally diverse learners a solid foundation and currency for reading and writing—for communicating, decoding, comprehending, and creating—both written and social text to read worlds and words. Here lies an art form: the “art” in language learning and language arts.
History, Identity, and Language Communities
I am an African American male, a descendant of Africans enslaved in the United States. I work as a tenured professor of education at Augsburg University, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I teach critical histories and philosophies of education, foundations of school and society, decolonizing social studies methods, and learning and development (educational psychology) courses in the Elementary Teacher Education Program. My racial, cultural and linguistic background situates and invites me to have a heightened sense and awareness of the way words are used, valued, and purposed in various sociocultural groups. I realized earlier on, as do many other African Americans and oppressed cultural groups, that there exist unspoken expectations about how to use and “speak” a normative, or standard, English. The book The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African American Children gives insight into the socio-political side of language and how language is inseparable from race and class in American education. Years ago, I noted that, perhaps more than any other educational subject, language—its usage and definition—grapples with questions of power, identity, and meaning (50).
To make this point, Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifin: The Language of Black Americans points to the fact that similar to American English, Australian English, and British English, there is Black English. However, this dialect and variety of English is shaded, “dissed,” and scorned–wiped away and whitewashed. Smitherman points out, “Educators (some of them black, to be sure) were preaching the Gospel that Black English speakers must learn to talk like White English speakers in order to ‘make it’” (2).
In his book Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca, the scholar and linguist John McWhorter challenged dominant views of excluding Black English as “English” by breaking down its mechanics, complexities, and sophistication. His conclusion is that standard English is adopted as a common language spoken and then written between speakers whose native languages are different. The unresolved tension is always “who adopted and enforced this common language.” In whatever way, decolonizing groups have to, in part, learn to use words, vocabulary, and “speak” and “write” like the dominant cultural group in power. When this is forced, learned, or programmed in schools, pre-existing vocabularies are compromised, and the power to use words and vocabulary to name reality and to write both social and literary text is also impacted and breached. A Black way, with words and with talking, can be dangerous in the United States of America, as history has shown: “Better keep your words, vocabulary, and their meanings to yourself, boy.” If not, one poses a threat to dominant ways of naming and reading the world with words and speech—a vocabulary for constructing reality, a reality, “the reality.” James Baldwin, the prolific twentieth-century novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, particularly related to African American boys and men, in The Fire Next Time, lived and observed, “the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions” (83).
Baldwin’s reading and writing of this truth and fact is seen throughout American history. Examples include life biographies of African Americans and their allies, such as Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, all killed by white men for threatening the then racist white status quo system during the Civil Rights Era in the 1950s and 60s. Beliefs, meaning, and power of whites, normed by words and vocabularies, set in motion written laws, policies, and social scripts for following. After all, the United States Constitution is a document of words, or is it? Here, it is the meanings and interpretations, backed by state military and force, that give rules, policies, and laws real power for reality and world-making. Similarly to writers, using words and creating rules for using words, roles, and scripts for “characters” and citizens are created, regulated, disciplined, and maintained by the pen. Words create worlds, and the meaning, value, and consequences of these words vary between human social groups. From here, we can see how words, learner experience, meaning, and power create a dynamic interplay between culture, self, and identities.
Arlette Ingram Willis, in Reading the World of School Literacy: Contextualizing the Experience of a Young African American Male, notes, “Going to the barbershop and getting a haircut is a bimonthly occurrence for many African American males. A number of Jake’s classmates differed in their definition of what constituted a ‘part’; however, the other African American children in his class have a similar cultural understanding of the term” (30).
Willis reflected more on the co-existence of school literacy, student experience, culture, language, and power, and how these can help or hinder culturally diverse learners’ reading and writing experiences,
Reflecting on our conversation, I sense Jack believes (understands?) that his perceived audience will never value nor understand the cultural images and nuances he wishes to share in his writing. Jake is a child wrestling with an internal conflict that is framed by sociohistorical and sociocultural inequalities of U.S. society. He is trying to come to grips with how he can express himself in a manner that is true to his “real self,” and yet please his teacher and audience of readers who are, in effect, evaluating his culture, thinking, language and reality. (33)
It has long been noted and observed by cultural linguists and anthropologists that words and vocabularies have different meanings across cultures, and in fact, these very words help to construct personal and social realities and identities. Here’s another example: take the word “thug.” In traditional definitions, a thug is associated with crime, bullying, robbers, aggression, and even assassins. A retort to this definition and description, some hip-hop artists have taken the word and made it to mean, signify, define, and represent Truly Humble Under God. Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give plays with the definition and meaning of THUG and flips it around, sort of speaking, to show the flexibility and fragility of definitions and meaning when the power of words or vocabularies are written or spoken. How can we nurture this playfulness, seriousness, and creativity in culturally diverse learners? The answer to this question brings linguistic freedom and supports diverse learners in reclaiming their language power. Language is powerful, and power, to say the least. Culturally diverse learners should think, feel, and act powerfully, too. Especially when using their words and vocabulary knowledge to read, learn, create, and live.
From this standpoint, I fell in love with using, learning, and teaching vocabulary knowledge building and strategies to all students, especially to culturally diverse students, and to their future pre-service teachers, who will teach and learn from them. It is a commitment to language arts teaching and learning—throughout the disciplines—by actively promoting critical thinking skills in language building, learning, and development. As a teacher, student, researcher, educational scientist, and user of words, I come to think of words and vocabulary as alchemical elements to mix, explore, and conduct experiments–to read, write, and speak into existence a variety of “texts.”
Teaching and learning how words work and how to “work words” reveal the deeper meaning of vocabulary learning. I am constantly reminded of how our social worlds are structured with words, how words build vocabularies, and how we use these, or not, to communicate, influence, and engage with people and the world around us. There is real power in words and vocabulary knowledge building and understanding, and even more power when those words and vocabularies are systematically stored, recalled, used, and valued in, and across, a variety of settings to promote and achieve April Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice for all culturally diverse learners. What is known by teachers, writers, social scientists, and theorists, along with lawmakers, is that vocabulary and words can be crafted to create, co-create, and care for literacy and vocabulary justice in our culturally responsive teaching and culturally relevant pedagogies. Specifically, here, vocabulary justice opens doors, worlds, roles, scripts, and text to, for, and with culturally diverse learners. But to do so, we must first reflect on and sustain vocabulary teaching.
Sustaining Vocabulary Teaching
In all of my courses and teaching, I intentionally use language methods and vocabulary strategies that I learned and have since adapted and built on from my undergraduate reading methods course with Professor Camille L. Z. Blachowicz, a renowned scholar of reading and best known for her vocabulary research work. Dr. Blachowicz advocated and taught that teaching vocabulary isn’t a tough sell. There are real benefits to the learner’s reading comprehension and understanding of incoming text as information and knowledge. Blachowicz notes in Vocabulary Lessons, “There is a long and clear line in reading education research that describes the strong link between a learner’s vocabulary knowledge and their reading comprehension” (66). The National Reading Report scientific sources and literature review also support the claim that there is a real link between vocabulary knowledge and a learner’s comprehension and understanding of information. Simply put, words and vocabulary help us understand and comprehend words in in-out-of-text contexts. Hence, text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-the-world connections are powerful tools to teach, learn, and use in reading worlds and words.
Given the strong connection between words and groups of words and how these help learners decode and comprehend many different texts, learning to read and reading to learn, especially for upper elementary students, go hand in hand because they promote the integration of prior and new knowledge learning. A two-pronged process is set up in our brains for recognizing similarities and dissimilarities of incoming and outgoing information. Whether we know it consciously or not, learners are always trying to make sense of and integrate new vocabulary (new ways of thinking and understanding) with archival vocabulary (prior thinking and understanding).
Culturally diverse learners need to make sense of what they are reading and experiencing. They constantly seek meaning in words in order to make the necessary connections for learning what and from their reading. This has been known, researched, documented, and reanalyzed through the years. The National Reading Panel Report, Learning Points Associates’ A Closer Look At The Five Essentials of Effective Reading Instruction: A Review of Scientifically Based Reading Research for Teachers, states, “Additionally, vocabulary is important for reading to learn as well as learning to read. Children need to understand the meanings of the words they read if they are to learn from what they read” (22).
Furthermore, teachers, parents, educators, and corporate interests intuitively know and understand the importance of a strong vocabulary. This is why, in all of my teaching, I model vocabulary knowledge building so teacher candidates can become more aware and agile in their comprehension of reading social and written texts and, more importantly, plant a seed for their own practice in teaching vocabulary to culturally diverse learners. According to Blachowicz, “Developing a strong vocabulary not only promotes reading comprehension but also enables us to participate in our society” (66).
Here, vocabulary learning and teaching are cultural artifacts and tools that promote the full participation and engagement of culturally diverse learners in their home, school, and peer group worlds. This is easier said than done for predominantly white teachers teaching culturally diverse learners. A false divide between learners’ home, school, and peer group prior knowledge of words and vocabulary is one of the problems. In other words, culturally diverse learners’ vocabularies of knowledge can only be sustained by teachers who break down the artificial walls of learning, specifically vocabulary learning, by actively engaging with the intersection between culture and language communities.
Artificial Vocabulary Boundaries
Research and theory in and on culturally responsive teaching (Gay), culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings), community of practice (Banks), cultural language modeling (Lee), and funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al.) all point to the fact that culturally diverse learners are participatory learners—willing or unwilling, conscious or unconscious. They are learners in communities of practices—family, peer group, ethnic and cultural groups. In these groups, diverse learners learn and practice different ways to participate by knowing how to conceptualize, define, and use words and language vocabulary. Their ways with words are grounded in place, setting, event, time, and group—situated thought language. Here, thought and language constitutes a whole. Moving towards the understanding that language, culture, and thought are inextricable, teachers can further their goals of developing a culturally responsive pedagogy, where the outcome for culturally diverse learners is critical consciousness. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a strong argument, historical fact, analysis, and method for recognizing, ratifying, and reimagining the power of language to create freedom for self and from societal conditioning. One simple developmental task is to become aware, or critically conscious, of learning why, when, where, what, and how to use words and vocabulary. You wouldn’t want to slip up, say something, or use words in a certain way that is “out of place.” Or you may want to use words, phrases, quotes, and the art of language to protest, to wrong a right.
Similarly to all cultural groups, culturally diverse learners contextualize, define, and use language differently in and across a variety of contexts and settings. This can be supported and sustained when teachers help diverse learners use and leverage all of their words and vocabularies, which reflect storehouses of representations of knowledge, associations, desires, imagination, ideas, thoughts, and images.
Cognitive science reports and informs us that learners develop patterns of thoughts and images to organize categories of information and the relationships among them.
Unfortunately, students and learners from less dominant cultures in schools find it difficult to bring and connect their real-world vocabularies and cognitive schemata to school content. This is because, in part, predominantly white teachers teaching culturally diverse learners do not systematically put into practice the theory and knowledge of prior learning and knowledge activation beyond the school world. Prior knowledge helps to structure new and incoming information. It is a frame of reference, a starting place, and a starting point to build on what is already known. Access to prior knowledge is useful in helping learners tackle new information or data. In other words, we build on and from prior knowledge–what the learner brings to, or already has and knows, before they learn new information. The mental strategies and resources learners bring with them into the school learning context are key in achieving connected, whole, and integrated learning and vocabularies.
We know that learners use and have schemata to form plans, mental models, and images to make sense of their worlds and written text. A schema—prior knowledge—is always at play when learning, especially given how language, and its varying word meanings and word concepts, have different meanings across various cultural and social groups and settings. When teachers engage learners’ prior knowledge or schema about words and word meanings in their curriculums and explicitly teach vocabulary knowledge building, culturally diverse learners begin to see how words and vocabularies have a way of moving, disclosing, exposing, and perfecting language arts, their social worlds, and themselves. It’s our job as educators to assist learners in building and bridging their cultural worlds, words, and vocabularies.
Building and Bridging Vocabularies: Theory to Practice
Language and word efficacy involves being or becoming conscious of building and constructing a personal body of words or a word bank—a vocabulary—to effectively communicate in different social and cultural settings. This takes time, teaching, and practice. How words, or a group of words, are used in a particular context, setting, or occasion matters. Reading a social scene or a written text requires knowing and understanding how “worlds” and words work together for understanding and comprehending. Research and science-based studies point to how vocabulary and comprehension is a critical area of reading instruction.
Decades of scientific research clearly show effective reading instruction addresses five critical areas: Phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Vocabulary is one of the five essential components of effective reading instruction from The National Reading Panel Report.
Furthermore, the term vocabulary takes on a couple of different meanings and concepts concerning what we need to know to communicate effectively with each other. In reading research, vocabulary takes on two forms. The first is listening and speaking—oral vocabulary. This is when learners use pronunciations and meanings of words they have stored orally to help them decode and read new print. The second is reading and written words—visual vocabulary. This is when learners repurpose their words—the ones used when writing and known by sight. Both oral and visual vocabularies play an important role in building word recognition and reading comprehension. However, to do so effectively, research points to systematic and explicit vocabulary instruction and teaching. Questions:
- Where do I start?
- How do I systematically and explicitly employ vocabulary instruction and teaching?
- How do I access what learners already know about words—concepts and ideas?
- How do I teach learners to bridge what they already know to what needs to be known or learned when encountering new or un/recognizable words?
Now, let’s consider a possible starting place by grounding theory in practice—both systematically and explicitly.
Systematic and Explicit Vocabulary Teaching
Teachers of culturally diverse learners should become familiar with many ways to systematically and explicitly teach vocabulary through their curriculum, including activating the learner’s prior vocabulary knowledge and experience—their schema. Systematically and explicitly teaching vocabulary words is known to be a scaffold and aid in reading and comprehending. The National Reading Panel review uncovers and highlights the importance of teaching vocabulary, both directly—separate from a larger narrative and text—and indirectly—as words appear in the text. This two-system approach and strategy provide a net for catching and teaching, directly and indirectly, words and vocabulary in and out of text. Familiarizing culturally diverse students in this way, and in your teaching, paves the way for learning words before reading to help them orient to and understand what they are about to read, and conversely gives the strategies to tackle words in “text.” This encourages learners to make associations between what they already know and what new text is in front of them to be read and understood.
Additionally, research-based vocabulary strategies using morphemic analysis routines to decode, interpret, and comprehend parts of words—prefixes, suffixes, and roots—allow learners to analyze and recognize parts relating to the whole. One goal here is to activate, engage, and allow learners to become aware of, and focused on, the movement and playfulness of words in social and literacy text. Word-play, and playing with words, is the golden art and craft of language learning and language arts. This playing with and analyzing words to see their parts and whole, such as word parts and base words, context clues, including dictionary or traditional definitions vs. popular and cultural definitions, and even shapes of them, contributes to and is recognized as a beginning systematic and explicit approach to vocabulary instruction. The key is to activate word awareness in learners, where they are actively engaging with words, sensing them, grouping them, regrouping them, comparing them, using them, evaluating them, and playing with them. This helps culturally diverse learners consistently and consciously build and sustain their vocabularies.
In building my own systematic and explicit practice in teaching vocabularies, I’ve read and adopted recommendations from The National Reading Panel Report, A Closer Look At The Five Essentials of Effective Reading Instruction: A Review of Scientifically Based Reading Research for Teachers (22-29) and Blachowicz’s STAR model which stands for Select, Teach, Activate and Revisit (68-69). I created my own model that helps incorporate teaching vocabulary strategies quickly, effectively, systematically, and explicitly. My model includes four components:
- Word focus. Select and use a story structure or text structure to pull words from (e.g., rebel, left, right, code, lion, cat, war, peace, or fighter). For example, a text on boxing or the civil rights movement yields different “fighters,” and for this very reason, focusing and selecting the word fighter is a powerful selection or word focus. Activate and access students’ schemas and vocabularies about what they already know about “fight,” or “fighter.”
- Word decoding. Teach definitional (different definitions), contextual (history, time, people, events, place), and usage meanings (word meaning variations), in and across different contexts. For example, keeping with the word “fighter,” has the meaning changed over time? Who are “fighters?” What is a “fighter?” Are “fighters” associated with a certain group of people? How is the word “fighter” used in a sentence? Is there a difference between a “fighter” and a “boxer”? Can you “fight” for a good cause? For a bad cause? Now, how should we view a “firefighter?”
- Word awareness. Activate the senses. For example, have culturally diverse learners be on the lookout for when they read, write, identify, record, gesture, or use a synonym for “fighter.” In other words, what are the cultural ways to see, hear, smell, touch, “taste” and feel a “fighter?”
- Word engagement. Revisit/engage words. For example, use and play games, creative writing, poems, note/flashcards, and word books utilizing technologies to ascertain students’ vocabulary knowledge, meanings, and usage of the word “fighter” in a summary, journal entry, or by exit ticket.
Collectively, this four-component vocabulary teaching model conceptualizes learners’ participation in both cultural and language communities and helps to integrate learners’ vocabularies and identities. When teachers activate learners’ prior knowledge of words and vocabularies, they in turn activate learners’ identity and identities. This process might even assist in culturally diverse learners achieving critical consciousness where words and actions animate the transformation and transcendence of self and society to write, rewrite, and live the “text” of freedom and possibility. Remember that for Freire, the outcome of critical consciousness is achieved through the method of alphabetization—by “literacy.” For example, learners can become literate—aware of both their existential reality of living in a tough neighborhood where they have to be, and identify as, and with, a physical “fighter,” and at the same time a social “fighter” for equality and justice for overcoming both physical and social forms of oppression and violence—in conditions, settings, and “text.” Here, ideas about the power of language in shaping reality and consciousness are important to reconnect and recall. When culturally diverse learners become word-aware, and when word engagement, focus, and decoding, is a goal in vocabulary teaching instruction, the sociopolitical dimensions of language—and how language relates to identification, identity, and identities—is revealed, recognized, and respected.
In summary, culturally diverse learners bring with them to school pre-existing and archival vocabularies—storehouses and banks of words from their lived experiences—and if assisted, these can be leveraged in school learning and in turn, encourage and empower lifelong joy and power in
- Learning how words work as objects, symbols, forms, and structures
- Learning how vocabulary works as a body of words
- Learning how to use words to build vocabularies and create storehouses and banks of words for recalling, selecting, and using in private and public discourse
- Learning how to use vocabulary for understanding text across learning topics and subjects
- Learning the power of words and having a strong vocabulary to write, rewrite, and change both literary and social “text”
- Learning to speak, use and play with words or a group of words freely
- Learning to embody the virtue of, “a strong vocabulary”, “a way with words”, “well spoken”, “a gift with words”, and ” a wide vocabulary”
It is easy to see how prioritizing vocabulary teaching and building vocabulary knowledge of diverse learners is a powerful instructional tool. By providing opportunities for culturally diverse learners to build a well-connected, organized, and retrievable stockpile of words and vocabularies for making powerful, subtle, and connected associations–between and across various learning environments and settings–is a strong and committed proposition for sustaining culturally diverse learner’s vocabularies.
In conclusion, using, knowing how to use, and decoding words and vocabularies is an art form: it’s language arts. Sustaining diverse learners’ interest, exploration, and understanding of vocabulary is a hallmark of good language arts teaching. When students have a solid foundation for decoding and understanding, they thrive in and master reading text. When teacher candidates, and teachers in general, begin to incorporate the ideas herein, they too can build and sustain their own teaching and learning of worlds, words, and vocabularies, through a research-based practice model. In the passing of the torch, and of the crafting of language as an art form, this article provides a reflective and practice space for preservice and practicing teachers to recall, reassess, reconsider, and re-engage in their teacher knowledge about, and instructional repertoire of practice for, teaching language arts. All of this is done in order to build, sustain, and empower culturally diverse learners’ vocabularies—for complete participation in reading, writing, and navigating different worlds and words.
Works Cited
Baker-Bell, April. Linguistic Justice: Black, Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Routledge. 2020.
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York, The Dial Press, 1963.
Banks, James. Introduction. Race, Culture, and Education: The Selected Works of James Banks. Routledge, 2006.
Blachowicz, Camille. “Vocabulary Lessons.” Educational Leadership, Vol. 61, No. 6, 2004, pp. 66-69.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000.
Gay, Geneva. Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. 3rd. Ed., Teachers College Press, 2018.
Gonzalez, Norma, et al., editors. Funds of Knowledge. Routledge, 2005.
Kwame-Ross, Terrance. African American Youth Discourse: What Is, What Should Be, and What Must We Do? Unpublished Dissertation, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus, 2004.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “Towards A Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.” American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 32, No. 3, 1995, pp. 465-491.
Learning Points Associates, Department of Education: “A Closer Look At The Five Essentials of Effective Reading Instruction: A Review of Scientifically Based Reading Research for Teachers.” 2004. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED512569.pdf
Lee, Carol. Culture, Literacy, and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind. Teachers College Press, 2007.
McWhorter, John. Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2017.
National Reading Panel Report, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD]. “Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction.” 2000. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf
Perry, Theresa and Delpit, Lisa. The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children. Beacon Press, 1998.
Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifying; The language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Thomas, Angie. The Hate U Give. HarperCollins, 2017.
Willis, Arlette. “Reading the World of School Literacy: Contextualizing the Experience of a Young African American Male.” Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 30-49.
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MEJ 