Anaphora, Board Races, and Vocab Strategies

For anyone who is still wondering about what the term anaphora means it is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of clauses. For anyone who wants to know what we did in class on Monday, we played a board race to see how much we remembered from reading assignment 3 and then were all tricked into believing kolpers was a real word. Finally, for anyone wondering what we did on Wednesday in class, we talked about vocab learning strategies--lots and lots of vocab learning strategies.

Anaphora is a particularly useful device when discussing vocabulary because it implements a key component of vocabulary learning. Anaphora uses repetition to make a point or to draw importance to a word or phrase in a sentence (or several sentences). Anaphora can be used as a way to repeat new vocabulary words in order to help the words stick in students' minds.

Beyond repetition, however, there are a few other key notions to allowing students to internalize new words. Students must also be able to make connections with their prior knowledge (schema) and the new word they are learning. This is where categorizing new words and measuring for students' familiarity comes in to play. A bus has four wheels, transports people, is bigger than a car, and is a vehicle. Besides making connections, and repetition, one of the third most important parts to internalizing vocabulary is placing the new words in context for students. Knowing the dictionary definition of Covert (concealed, secret, disguised) does not help a student learn the word outside of its definition, which means that the student cannot generate the word in his/her own words.

However, if we were to say: Allison, a covert officer for the CIA, is on a top secret mission in Prague, our students would have a much better chance at understanding how to use the word "covert" because they have proper context for it (assuming, of course, that the CIA and spies are connected within their schema).

So. How do you manage to take all of this very important vocabulary learning and pack it in to your content area lesson plans? By using vocabulary learning strategies, of course!

My top five picks for vocabulary learning methods are:

1. Freerice.com. This is a "method" that I would use during the downtime of my classroom because it is a covert attempt to teach students vocabulary. Students (and indeed anyone) who play the game believe that they are playing an easy game that simultaneously attempts to conquer world hunger. They see this as fun and charity work that doesn't require them to do anything rather than answer some questions. As a result, they may not know they're learning which makes it a perfect down time activity.

2. Word Journals. I particularly like the word journals for literary terms/devices because once students have completed a significant portion of their word journal (as set aside in class) it can become an English (class) dictionary for them--just in case they forget what anaphora is. Word journals are also a great opening activity for a class period that can be used on a regular basis.

3. Four-Fold Concept Development. I love the idea of taking a unit's vocab list (say for SAT prep, perhaps) and dividing it up among the students. The students believe they're doing 1/20th of the work they might normally have to do and then in the interactive portion of concept development (after the students have made their foldables and are sharing around) they are required to collaborate with and engage their fellow students in order to really learn the words.

4. ABC Book. While ABC books may be kind of corny, this usually allows students to get really creative with their work and allows for further connections to a text. Ideally I'd like to implement this in correspondence with a choice novel or a choice project so as to allow students greater freedom and more chances to connect with the difficult (or perhaps not so difficult) language in their texts.

5. Word Wall. This is another method that is particularly effective for vocabulary instruction/SAT prep in an English classroom. It requires students to collaborate together to create a word wall and perhaps students in the upper level classes could have some sort of incentive for using word wall words during class (contribution to a pizza party or some sort of free homework pass? perhaps bonus points on the next test or assignment?) That would encourage students to use the words on the word wall and would help them learn the words under the guise of earning a reward.

Now then, bonus points if you can find the two examples of Anaphora I placed in this post.