A research-based strategy for inductively accelerating vocabulary acquisition of at-risk students in Grade 4

Abstract

This study explored the acceleration of vocabulary growth through a multi-part instructional strategy for engendering the inductive, semantic word-family oriented acquisition of vocabulary from context, a difficult task for elementary students. Implemented on a school-wide basis in grade 4 over an 8-week period, the intervention was a four-part enhancement to each of six regular basal reading stories that focused on 17 semantic word families associated with selected words in the stories. Results showed a.) that experimental students inductively generated greater numbers of words with similar meanings that could be substituted for novel words in 3-sentence story-context passages and to word-family pairs; and; b.) that Title 1 experimental students displayed greater achievement than comparable Title I controls on the ITBS Vocabulary Subtest.