I am a firm believer in reading aloud to my 7-8 grade students regularly, if not daily. My ESL students need repeated exposure to English words in context. I know that my thinking aloud has helped my students understand how I process different texts, and how I think about the texts as a mental response, but I haven’t been satisfied with how I have used the read-aloud experience to really help the students develop wider vocabularies.

I had a flash of a procedure that would be a more systematic approach. What if I took just a few (maybe 5) great words from the portion of text I was reading (whether fiction or non-fiction) and did some more in-depth study of those words over a few days (until I chose some new words)?

For example, read a chapter from the current read- aloud choice, stopping at the chosen words as I read to highlight them. After the read-aloud/think aloud, put those 5 words on large index cards and post.  Discuss what the words means as used in the text. Alphabetize in a word wall. Multi-syllabic words can be “chunked” into syllables. They can be studied for affixes. The roots can be removed and then a circle map created for new words using the same root. An association game can be played using the word and the character/situation from the text that it is related to in some way. Words can be sorted by part of speech, or tense, or origin.

The point of this is that vocabulary becomes imbedded in meaningful reading of text, and that students get multiple, but short, exposures throughout a week.