In high school, students are actively and consciously taught new vocabulary through a variety of methods – quizzes being the most obvious. I remember receiving extra credit on my essays whenever I incorporated words we had recently learned. Of course, the situation changes in college – students are expected to expand their vocabulary on their own, with the exception of discipline-specific terminology.
I am a little concerned about this. Often when I am working with students on their essays, I find that they have more clarity when they explain things to me themselves in regular conversational English. In these cases I tell them that they should “simply” write what they said because it is so much clearer. Although this kind of clarity and vocabulary aren’t the same thing, couldn’t the upshot be that I am asking students to limit their experimentation with more challenging verbal styles?
How do we encourage students to become more sophisticated writers, rather than better basic writers? How do college students learn to become familiar and competent with SAT and GRE type words as well as with jargon? I am afraid that by striving for clarity with my students I may be sacrificing the learning that comes from awkwardly trying out a new phrase or “big” word.
If students aren’t comfortable using SAT words, then they aren’t going to express themselves clearly with them, certainly not in a first draft. When we talk about revising in the workshops that we run for students taking Great Works of World Literature, we talk about the presentation of the ideas as the last stage—not only spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but also vocabulary, phrasing, varied sentence structure, etc. If students don’t have the ideas in order, they can’t figure things out using someone else’s language. Very often, I find students echoing the language of the assignment without understanding all of the vocabulary involved, so they misunderstand or entirely miss the point. Asking students to use a dictionary whenever they don’t understand a word will help them to develop and broaden their vocabulary. Websites such as bartelby.com or merriamwebster.com, which have dictionaries that not only define words but can pronounce them as well, can help students understand what they read, what they need to do for an assignment, and will hopefully encourage them to take risks with word choice in their writing or speaking.
Making vocabulary part of the course is another important part of this process. Sometimes teaching students to use conjunctions other than “and” can be a valuable vocabulary lesson. In other courses, I’ve had students choose a word from the reading to explicate; they define the word, consider its origin if relevant or useful, and then describe how this definition helps them to understand the passage better, or why using this word is particularly telling. This works nicely in literature classes, but it could work in any assignment or situation where students need to consider the word choices made, such as looking at advertising, or at different media’s depiction of a piece of news, or at University rules or requirements. Students can then post their explications on Blackboard, so that the whole class can benefit from the work each student has done. This is a much more interesting way to learn vocabulary than studying a list of words for a quiz.
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