Word of the Week: Tier 2 vocabulary calendar/poster set
*Tier 2 vocabulary is a tricky one for students, and it's something we've talked about a lot (eg here). Tier 2 words are the academic vocabulary that turns up far more in writing than in speech. They aren't subject-specific terms like elasticity or externality, and they aren't the everyday words students pick up in conversation. Students who aren't reading a great deal, therefore, are less likely to have come across them, and that can be a barrier when they are reading, creating a vicious cycle.
We want to expand students' Tier 2 vocabulary, but the tricky part is choosing which words to focus on. There are thousands and thousands of Tier 2 words we could teach, and we can't teach them all, so the job is picking out the powerful ones. I have previously explained that I start by focusing on nine interaction words: amplify, exacerbate, compound, mitigate, offset, temper, negate, alleviate and curb. They're useful in students' wider lives as well as in essays, but students rarely reach for them without explicit instruction. Beyond those nine, it's worth thinking about which other words are powerful enough to earn some teaching time, which is how I ended up making a word-of-the-week calendar with 52 of them (the interaction words are all in there too).
By powerful, I mean the word does one or both of two jobs:
1. It appears a lot in the reading we want students to be doing (eg non-fiction books, newspapers, the articles we use for context building). Therefore, being more confident in that vocabulary will make that reading easier.
2. It lets students make more complex points in their writing. Importantly, I don't just mean that it makes the writing sound fancier. I'm looking for words that give students a way to say something more precise, rather than a posher way of saying the same thing. Where a student might previously have written "prevent", for example, "mitigate" often has a more nuanced meaning that might better fit the scenario.
Cutting thousands down to 52 was a challenge, and I tried hard to pick the ones I think do one or both of these jobs best.
For how to actually teach the words, I really enjoyed Kathrine Mortimore's book, Disciplinary Literacy and Explicit Vocabulary Teaching, and I've borrowed a couple of her strategies for the calendar. Alongside a definition and an example in an economics context, each word has its root, which helps students recognise connections between words and gives them a fighting chance of deciphering new ones. At the bottom of each page there's a "similar to X, but Y" line, which takes a word students probably already know and explains the nuance between the two, so they can see when the new word is the better fit. Students don't tend to absorb very much by osmosis, so a set of posters isn't going to be sufficient, but it was a place to start. I've also made a Quizlet set for those terms, in case you wanted to test them explicitly. You can find that here.
On the practical side, the pages aren't dated, so you can start wherever you like. In fact, you could just select a number per term and display those all at once, as there's nothing on them to indicate that they came from a calendar. If nothing else, you might just want to take a look to see which words you might focus on. If you did want to display one per week, there are a ways to do this that don’t involve you printing each week:
1. Clip and flip. Print the whole thing single-sided, hold the top together with binder rings, and flip a page over each week.
2. Staple and rip. Print it single-sided, staple it at the top, and rip a page off each week.
3. Poly pocket. Pop the stack in a poly pocket or plastic wallet attached to the wall, and move the front sheet to the back each week.
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