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Over the past 50 years, interest in vocabulary has repeatedly waxed and waned. Today, however, the importance of vocabulary is widely and firmly recognized. The recent interest is due to a number of factors, among the most important of which are these five: Hart and Risley's Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Lives of Young American Children (1995) revealed the huge vocabulary deficit faced by many children of poverty. Growing numbers of English-language learners in U.S. classrooms require assistance in developing their English vocabularies. The Report of the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) identified vocabulary as one of the five central components of reading instruction. The report of the RAND Reading Study Group (RAND Education, 2002) identified vocabulary as crucial to reading comprehension. And the No Child Left Behind legislation identified vocabulary instruction as one of the five required components of Reading First programs (United States, 2002).
Evidence of the current interest in vocabulary can be found in the fact that 75% of the respondents to IRA's most recent pole of What's hot and What's Not in reading (Cassidy & Cassidy, 2005) agreed that vocabulary should be a "very hot" topic. Evidence can further be found in the fact that four significant books on vocabulary instruction have been published in the past year-Block and Mangieri's The Vocabulary-Enriched Classroom (2006), Hiebert and Kamil's Teaching and Learning Vocabulary (2005), Stahl and Nagy's Teaching Word Meanings (2006), and my own The Vocabulary Book (Graves, 2006).
In this article, I first discuss the importance of vocabulary, the number of words students need to learn, and the vocabulary deficit faced by some children. Next, I discuss the multifaceted and long-term vocabulary program that I describe in The Vocabulary Book, a program that includes four parts: Providing Rich and Varied Language Experiences, Teaching Individual Words, Teaching Word-Learning Strategies, and Fostering Word Consciousness. Following that, I provide a more detailed look at one part of that program by describing some of the procedures for Providing Rich and Varied Language Experiences in more detail. I conclude the article with suggestions for implementing the fourpart program and an estimate of the time such a program is likely to require.
THE IMPORTANCE OF VOCABULARY
This current interest in...