Room RDC 10: Spencer Salas: "Short texts, new words, and adolescent readers" - (GV, YAL)

Reading with adolescents can pose a number of challenges; and, teachers working with adolescent learners are concerned about students understanding text and texts at the word level. Research has long underscored the importance of vocabulary instruction for literacy development and, in particular, for reading comprehension (Ely et al. 2014) with contemporary scholarship and practice emphasizing, among other things, the development of adolescent readers’ academic language. Vocabulary building is seen as central to that endeavor (Echevarría, Vogt, and Short 2012; Vogt, Echevarría, and Short 2010). But a challenge for teachers who work with readers in secondary-level English classrooms is to teach vocabulary in the context of shared readings—and in ways that engage students in collaborative, motivated meaning-making. In this workshop, participants take up a series of flexible, participatory starting points for teaching and learning new words in reading-based language classrooms, using a Jack London excerpt as an anchor. The goal of the workshop is to provide practitioners and learners with actual examples of dynamic, cooperative strategies for engaging adolescent readers with the new words encountered in a prescribed curriculum.