Reflection #7: Tierney and Readance Ch. 8

I like the fact that this chapter opened by immediately listing some strategies for vocabulary development. I was pleased to see that many of these are natural to implement in a world language classroom. The strategies "Possible Sentences" as well as "Contextual Redefinition" were two that stood out to me in particular as being definitely applicable every day in any reading in my Spanish class. What I liked about this chapter, as I have liked about most of the readings for this class, was that it made me think more carefully about how I can implement this strategy more explicitly and actually TEACH my students how to read using these strategies! In "Possible Sentences" I like how reading aloud and pronunciation of the words is emphasized to an extent. In a world language, this is obviously very important, as the end goal is communicative proficiency in the target language, and one cannot communicate effectively if one cannot be understood due to incorrect pronunciation. I also like that this strategy uses student-generated examples as the driving examples behind the lesson, and allows for students to make mistakes and all learn from those mistakes together. This encourages the natural process of learning through commiting mistakes and then checking them against the text. The "Word Map" was another strategy that I'd like to try to implement more. I like the idea of having a mixture of concrete and abstract vocabulary terms and letting students organize the words (after defining them correctly) in a hierarchy that they determine individually depending on what it most memorable and significant to them.