Gamfiying Vocab and Diagnosis Meaning

Teaching vocabulary - from old school note cards to using root words to derive meaning, there are many methods that can be used to promote vocabulary acquisition. As a high school student, morphology made sense to me. My sophomore English teacher was passionate about drilling the Latin meanings of prefixes and suffixes, and to this day, I can dissect words to glean understanding. While teaching root words is not as integral to the curriculum that I teach, vocabulary strategies are still at the forefront of helping students improve their reading skills - especially when I am teaching struggling students or English language learners. To help make main ideas and authors' claims more cognizable, students need to have a foundational understanding of how to comprehend the words they read, especially when texts may contain words that they have not encountered before. And in case anyone was wondering - gnos means to know; that root happens to be my favorite.

This summer, I am teaching a group of what I affectionately am referring to as repeat offenders or students who for whatever reason, struggled through freshman English and found themselves sitting in summer school. My goal with these students to help them develop a strong sense of self-efficacy, cultivate essential literacy skills, and show them that learning can be fun. By building into these students as people, showing them grace, and helping them brush up on skills that can apply reading and writing in any context, I hope to empower them and give them the confidence they need to be active learners moving forward. Part of being a successful student in any discipline is understanding the language and being able to decipher meaning from a text.

Students who avoid reading at the high school level often struggle more than they like to admit to reading comprehension. A significant part of that struggle is not being able to access the meaning of the text or the words within it. I find this to be particularly true when reading nonfiction texts in the science and social science disciplines. To combat this issue, one of my focuses this summer is helping students use context clues to make meaning of what we are reading. Yes, students can use their Chromebooks to look up the definition of a word, but even with that resource (which they are reluctant to use in that capacity), they still may struggle with understanding what the author is trying to say. Instead, encouraging students to use context clues to create overall understanding can empower them and give them the confidence they need to succeed.

Using gamification, I have encouraged students to enjoy vocabulary work. To help students prepare for accessing a text, I provide students with sentences that contain vocabulary words underlined. We read the sentence first together as they are projected on the board. Then I have turned to fan favorite formative assessment tools such as Kahoot, Quizlet, GimKit, and Quizziz that challenge students to apply what they have initially understood about the words presented and also shed light on what words they may need to review more thoroughly.

Often, I start with Quizlet to allow students to use the flashcards and individual games to review the words that we are studying for the day first. Note that I typically have used 12 words in any given session, which I find to be an adequate number of words to make the learning experiences interesting while not overloading students with too many words as too many words may limit student retention. After students are exposed to the words, I will start a Quizlet live session, which encourages students to dialogue about the words with each other. Then, we play a quick round of one of the more competitive formative assessment tools to reinforce gained knowledge. I prefer GimKit as it repeats questions, which means more exposure to the words students are attempting to learn. After a session of formative gaming, we have read and annotated these articles together - stopping to talk about the words and their meanings while we read. While this process can be time-consuming, modeling the use of context clues and vocabulary learning to the class can show students the importance of understanding the words they read and empower them to be able to decipher texts based on the clues and content provided to them.

This summer has been an enjoyable experience with students and the gamification of vocabulary words. Witnessing students processing texts and seeking a deeper understanding of words they may not be familiar with has been such a positive experience. These students are so capable of decoding the texts we have been exploring related to cell phone and technology issues, mental health, and healthy lifestyle choices. I am encouraged by their ability to make connections, identify authors' claims, infer, and evaluate what we are reading. My prognosis for student literacy success- take the time to cultivate vocabulary skills. When students can diagnosis definitions and examine a text to find the author's intended message, they are sure to have a healthy sense of reading self-efficacy.