WORD PARTS VOCABULARY STRATEGY
Once the student sees the letters on the page, how can they attach meaning to them?
Acquiring meaning is no easy task!
Attaching meaning to words a student sees is even more complex. Shaywitz and Shaywitz (2008) summarize the multiple skills involved in learning to read as follows: the awareness that spoken language can be broken down into smaller elements called phonemes (since, due to coarticulation, the brain hears spoken words fluently rather than as separate sounds), the ability to identify letters, the knowledge of how those letters represent sounds, the ability to recognize words accurately and rapidly, and the possessing of vocabulary knowledge in order to gain meaning from printed words.
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Castles et al. (2018) indicate that the visual form area located within the left-hemisphere ventral pathway responds to written language, words and nonwords in particular. When it comes to translating the letters a student sees into sounds, Shaywitz and Shaywitz (2008) identify this process as a sublexical rule-based pathway where the brain maps the letters in a series left to right. This process of assembled phonology is when the phonological code is assembled letter by letter and mapped in order to connect to the corresponding sounds so they can be blended to form the sound of words that the student is familiar with from spoken language (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2008). Castles et al. (2018) refers to this process of phonologically mediated reading as alphabetic decoding.
Activation in the brain is dominant in the left hemisphere neural system. Specifically, the process of addressed phonology is more a dorsal system. The decoding of letters occurs in the dorsal system and is only one of the two systems the student’s brain uses to identify words and their meanings. The other, located in the ventral system, “addresses the phonological code directly from the stored lexical representations” (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2008, p. 1331). This direct route, where the whole word is identified from memory rather than having to map out sounds first is referred to as the lexical pathway (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2008). Both the dorsal and ventral pathways are implicated in reading, however, the ventral pathway use becomes more dominant over time as the sensitivity to familiar printed words increases and the need for the phonologically driven dorsal pathway decreases (Castles et al., 2018).
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Figure 2 shows the striatum which is implicated in creating sound-meaning links. Retrieved from: https://beyondthedish.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/basal-ganglia.jpg
It is interesting to note that students with dyslexia rely more on right hemisphere regions for reading because, in their brains, “the white matter pathways supporting reading project too weakly within the primary reading pathways of the linguistic left hemisphere, but they project too strongly between hemispheres” (Gabrieli, 2009, p. 282). This shows how the structures and functions in the brain influence how the sensory information is processed in order to gain meaning from printed words.
On a subcortical level, the basal ganglia is essential for learning that is acquired through habit and “learning sequences of actions or stimulus-response mappings” (Krishnan, Watkins & Bishop, 2016, p. 703). This declarative process is an important part of learning to read. The striatum is implicated in creating sound-meaning links and the ventral striatum is active when we are learning to read words, but decreases as these novel words are repeated and are no longer new. Responding to feedback in verbal paired-associated tasks is the dorsal striatum. Further, the corticostriatal and corticohippocampal networks are implicated in word learning. (Krishnan p. 706).
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So what happens when a student sees a word to which they do not know the meaning?
The obvious answer is to teach vocabulary words before engaging in reading, however, Castles et al. (2018) noted that students only showed gains in reading comprehension when the vocabulary words they received direct instruction on were on the test. They assert that “more active approaches might be more beneficial than more passive ones” (Castles p. 36) and they support instruction that focuses on “multiple and flexible strategies for establishing word meaning” (Castles et al., 2018, p. 36). Armbruster et al. (2006) also advocates for this approach as students “need to be able to determine the meaning of words that are new to them but not directly taught to them” (p. 32).
So rather than teach students the meaning of specific words, since we can’t teach them all of the words they may encounter, teachers can instruct students on strategies they can use to determine word meaning on their own.
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One strategy students can use is what I referred to in my teaching as Word Parts. In this strategy, students examine the word to see if there are parts of the word they are familiar with. In the example, the word ‘recoil’ has a base word of ‘coil’ that students may be familiar with. Students may also be aware that ‘re’ means to do again. From that knowledge, students could infer that ‘recoil’ means to ‘coil again’ or retract. The reading quiz question asks the student which strategy is best used to determine the meaning of ‘recoiled’. The correct answer would be B. When determining a student’s ability to infer word meanings as a dimension of their reading comprehension, a teacher could simply 'what does the word "recoil" mean?', but by asking which strategy they used to find the meaning, the teacher is communicating to students that the process of understanding is just as important as the answer.
Armbruster et al. (2006) affirms that instruction on using word parts to learn the meaning of new words is based on teaching students to use common prefixes, suffixes, base words, and root words. This approach would be supported by Seidenberg (2007) as he reports that many studies have shown that vocabulary instruction benefits readers even though “only a very small percentage of words can be taught” (Seidenberg, 2007, p. 113).