What Really Matters in Vocabulary

To Pat Cunningham vocabulary isn't just a predictor for comprehension it is a reminder of how much meaning vocabulary matters and how complex it is to teach children meanings for words.

In many ways, things are better in our schools for children who we used to call “underprivileged” and “disadvantaged.”

Every state now has public kindergarten and pre K is available for our most needy children. The Internet and other technologies make “bringing words to life” a richer and more do-able goal. However, we still have many children coming to school with impoverished vocabularies. Many of these children come from underpriviledged families and many do not come with much English. Drawing on her experience as a classroom teacher, researcher, scholar, author, and co-founder of the Four-Blocks Literacy Framework Pat Cunningham offers elementary teachers a practical model and friendly strategies for helping ALL students develop their vocabularies. Guiding teachers to use all available resources to build rich meaning vocabularies, she helps to ensure every student's success in school and beyond. There is no way to overstate the importance of meaning vocabulary to comprehension. The size of a child's vocabulary is one of the best predictors of how well he or she will comprehend while listening or reading. Simply stated, what really matters is building bigger vocabulary to make all students better readers.

Features:

Pat Cunningham grew up in Rhode Island. For seven years, after graduating from The University of Rhode Island, she taught a variety of elementary grades in Florida and Indiana. She received her Ph. D in Reading Education from the University Of Georgia in 1974. After teaching at Ohio University and serving as Director of Reading for Alamance Co., North Carolina Schools, she came to Wake Forest University to direct the Elementary Education program in 1978.

Pat’s particular interest has always been in finding alternative ways to teach children for whom learning to read is difficult. Reading and Writing in Elementary Classrooms, first published in 1978, is currently in its fourth edition. In 1991, She published Phonics they Use: Words for Reading and Writing, which is currently available in its fourth edition. Along with Richard Allington, She published Classrooms that Work and Schools that Work. Along with Dorothy Hall, she developed the Four Blocks Literacy framework, which is currently used as the balanced literacy framework in thousand of classrooms throughout the country. She and Dorothy Hall are co-directors of the Four Blocks Literacy Center, which is housed at Wake Forest University.