KIM HAWGOOD

Opening Statement:

Teaching writing is a complex but critical skill. Many students find learning to write a challenge and are easily overwhelmed by the writing demands of school and beyond. Declining writing skills around the world demonstrate our failure to support them. Many teachers also find teaching writing an onerous task – motivating students, providing instruction, finding time to write and giving effective, actionable feedback. In this workshop, we will explore the role of vocabulary in the writing process. How can we equip students with the vocabulary they need to talk about writing, plan for writing, make effective word choices, create rich and engaging texts and understand and respond to the language of feedback? Participants will be given practical tips and resources they can immediately apply in the classroom. Hopefully, they will also take away an enthusiasm for word awareness and an understanding of the role words play in improving comprehension and self-expression both inside and outside the classroom.

The content of this workshop is equally relevant for monolingual and bilingual classrooms. It acknowledges the value of language and promotes the need for shared vocabulary understanding within and across languages.

Hawgood, Oct 5, 2021

What is word awareness? Why is it important?

Word awareness is largely based on vocabulary. Vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and abilities, not just skill in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, but also general knowledge of science, history, and the arts. For Hawgood, vocabulary is critically important as we know the difference it can make for students in school and beyond. 

Children who start with a rich vocabulary in their home life, start with an advantage at school. Students need to learn 50,000+ words to thrive in school and beyond. In order to learn those 50,000 words students would need to learn 96 words every week for every year of schooling. According to Hawgood, that’s an impossible task. Here is where word awareness comes in. 

Word awareness is all about connection. Teaching where words come from and how their forms can be changed (this is called etymology and morphology). Word awareness has to do with control, which is the power to choose the right word and at the right time (some people call this word choice). And the x-factor of word awareness is curiosity, a love of words that inspires further learning. This is an expansion of word awareness that allows for that goal of 50,000 words a bit more achievable. We need to be strategic about how vocabulary and content knowledge is composed and built upon.

How to build vocabulary and content knowledge

Three Tiers of Vocabulary Words

Tier 1 Words 

• …are encountered in everyday conversation.
• …are learned implicitly through talking and listening

Tier 2 Words

• …are academic words needed to access more complex topics and discussions across topics and subject areas.
• …require explicit instruction to ensure students can understand and express complex ideas and understand the tasks that they’re asked to do.

Tier 3 Words

• …are Low-frequency domain-specific academic words needed for specific subjects or content areas (mine would be reremahi, rerehāngū, rereāhua, rerewāhi, etc.)
• …require explicit instruction in the context of the subject matter.

How does building word awareness help with writing?

Here we look at how word awareness fits in with writing. Writing is a highly complex expressive skill requiring the simultaneous coordination and control of multiple sub-skills. The teaching of writing is problematic worldwide. It is complex, and unfortunately our achievement rates in writing are not in good shape. It’s difficult to learn and it’s difficult to teach.

The teaching of writing is problematic worldwide….It’s difficult to learn and it’s difficult to teach.

Hawgood, Oct 5, 2021

The Writing Rope

This is adapted from Scarborough’s Reading Rope. There are two core components – composition and transcription. Both of them need to work in concert for effective writing.

Skilled Writing

Skilled writing requires fluent execution and coordination of composition and transcription skills.

Composition refers to:

• Vocabulary and word choice;
• Addressing audience, purpose and context;
• Having control over/of sentence structures;
• Having control over/of text structures;
• Being able to create ideas and gather information.

These skills need to be increasingly strategic. As students improve their writing skills, they should be more and more flexible in dipping in and out of their toolbox to choose the right strategy at the right time. 

Transcription refers to:

• Spelling, punctuation and grammar
• Handwriting and keyboarding
• The effective presentation of our writing

Transcription skills need to become increasingly automatic. We want students not to have to think about that component of writing. So we want grammar, spelling and handwriting to be easier and not get in the way and not add to the cognitive load of writing.

If we can get all of these things working together, we have skilled writers who are fluent in the executive and the coordination of both composition and transcription skills. 

Word awareness addresses vocabulary and word choice, audience, purpose and context. Gives them control of sentence structures. Being word aware helps them control and manipulate sentences. Word awareness also has an enormous place in spelling, punctuation and grammar knowledge.  

How do I build word awareness?

50,000 words is an awful lot, and 96 words per week is near impossible, but with 20 root words and 14 prefixes and knowing how to use them will unlock for the student over 100,000 words. 

Connection of Words through Morphology

Example 1: Interpret (verb)

Explain the meaning of; translate

Explicit instruction could include putting it in a sentence, potentially drawing it, finding synonyms, finding antonyms. Word awareness takes explicit instruction a step further by investigating the morphology of the word. In other words, how can we build and grow this word? How can we add suffixes, or gerunds to the ends of words. 

• Interpret [verb]
• Interprets [third person singular verb]
• Interpreted [past tense]
• Interpreting [present continuous] 
• Interpretation [noun form (also called nominalisation)]
• Interpretations [noun form plural]

One word has become 6 words. We add to those 6 words by adding the prefix mis-

• Misinterpret
• Misinterprets
• Misinterpreted
• Misinterpreting
• Misinterpretation
• Misinterpretations

Now we have 12 words. The word interpret can also words with the prefix re- [again]

• Reinterpret
• Reinterprets
• Reinterpreted
• Reinterpreting
• Reinterpretation
• Reinterpretations

Now we have 18 words. We haven’t included words like interpreter, interpretive, and interpretable. 

This is something I can do with te reo Māori teaching and learning. Building word awareness of te reo Māori also needs to be strategic. Using these strategies can be helpful for teaching new kupu to my ākonga. I believe te reo Māori does not have the same complexities as English.

Connection of Words through Etymology

60% of English words come from Latin and Greek roots. If we look at the etymology of words, the history of words and how they’ve changed over time we also expand our repertoire and come much closer to that 50,000 word acquisition. 

Explicit instruction includes using images to make connections. Putting the word into another word. Adding prefixes and suffixes and so on. Etymology and morphology help with that connection component of building that word awareness. 

1. unlocking The Power of Control

Just this alone is not enough to really make a difference. So we look now at control. Being able to use words flexibly allows students to control structure, expression, tone, precision and concision are incredibly important skills to master in order to become an effective writer.  This unlocks power and control for students allowing them to change the sentences around, use words in different parts of speech, to allow them to create sentences in the way they want to create them. Not the other way around. In the older students, we want students to be able to flexibly move between the different word forms to meet their particular needs in writing.

2. Unlocking The Power of Word Choice

Word choice to make writing clearer

The power of language, that understanding of the parts of speech, allows students to flexibly control the sentence structure. For example:

Word choice to make writing more concise

This is particularly true of informative text. For example:

Word choice to make writing more formal

Example:

The final component of this control part of ‘word awareness’ is word choice. These are synonyms – connecting similar words. Collocations – words that often go together.

Include synonym instruction in your explicit instruction in vocabulary work.

What is often overlooked, especially for second language learners, is collocation or words that often go together. It’s a language connection we get from conversation from people who have good control of the English language. This would be especially important for all my learners at school. What is really important about these words is the opportunity it gives students.

Without good word choice we ask students to create a masterpiece using just a handful of colours compared to what they would be able to create if they had the full spectrum of colours at their disposal. This is what word choice does, making sure students have a huge collection of colours to draw on as they choose words in order to write.

3. Unlocking The Power of Curiosity

This is the third and final component of word awareness is the power of curiosity. 

Curiosity starts with the teacher – the teacher in the classroom is the one that triggers the curiosity. And it is contagious. When you’re excited about words, students are excited about words. That curiosity builds word awareness. How do we do that? Model rich oral vocabulary, especially in the context of our more specialist subject areas. Use the vocabulary that goes with the topic. Encourage talk before all reading and writing. Allow students to experiment with the way that they put these words together. Use them again and again. One exposure is not enough. Allow time for talk. Word detectives, look for patterns between words as you notice things. Point them out as you’re reading, as student’s are reading. Allow them to be part of this detective process. Inspire in your classroom a curiosity for words. Be curious and inspire curiosity. 

It could be as simple as providing one word and then giving some prefixes and suffixes students can use to explore and build their word awareness. Use a word like ‘tū’ and give prefixes such as whaka- and suffixes such as -nga/-ranga and -ngia/-ria. 

What next?

• Start early.
• Develop a consistent, whole-school approach to academic vocabulary learning. A consistent language and a consistent message will show students how much vocabulary is valued in your school.
• Create a vocabulary scope and sequence within and across subject areas. Plan for this as a school and decide which vocabulary needs to be consistent across year levels and across subject areas.
• Plan for vocabulary instruction.

This kōrero links with Pānia Papa’s mention of the important words such as whakaatu, whakaahua, and tautohu. I can link this in here and design a lesson around this.