CHOOSING the RIGHT WORD … AND … CHOOSING HOW to TEACH IT
It felt kind of discouraging … I felt defeated before I even started… when I read all the research, the texts, the articles about the tremendous word knowledge deficit facing students who come from low-income families – they were the majority of the students in my school. Knowing I cannot teach them the thousands of vocabulary words they haven’t heard- and by middle school the complex nuances of idioms and figurative language- I had to find a way for my students to learn words and to learn about words. I wanted to minimize the barriers to their achievement and success.
and then I learned about “word consciousness”