![]() ![]() – Because most words are used multiple times, a million words include about 17,200 different words. – The average middle-class fifth grader reads about 1,000,000 words a year. The only other strategy would seem to be students inferring the meaning of new words as they read. How is that possible? Direct vocabulary instruction is essential, she says, but if students are taught (and actually learn) 20 words each week from Grade 1 to 12, they will have only 8,640 words by high-school graduation – not even close to what’s needed. In this American Educator article*, Brown University professor Marilyn Jager Adams says that eighth graders need to know about 100,000 words to be proficient readers of advanced texts. I have included games, visual vocabulary cards, and cartoons. There are many approaches to learning vocabulary words. The repetition worked for me (and it turns out self-testing is the key to learning) and my SAT score was so markedly improved, shocking my high school guidance counselor. ![]() One of my Harvard roommates memorized the dictionary. I think some kids are able to learn 100,000 words just through reading and inference. I read enormous quantities of books as a child, but when I took my PSAT test in high school, I did not know enough vocabulary words to get a decent score. 100,000 vocabulary words seems like an impossible number to master by 8th grade! I found this article to figure out the science behind how kids actually learn that many words (and just in time for the SAT test!). ![]()
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