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This episode we’re speaking with Margaret McKeown, Margaret, or Moddy as she likes to be called,  is Clinical Professor Emerita of Education at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to retirement, Margaret was a Senior Scientist at the University’s Learning Research and Development centre, and her work addresses practical and current issues that classroom teachers face at the chalkface. She has undertaken research in such areas as learning, instruction, teacher professional development, reading comprehension, and vocabulary instruction, the topic of today’s podcast. She’s also a member of the American Education Research Association, and was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame. So we’re super lucky to have Moddy back on the podcast. 

Last time, Moddy spoke about Questioning the Author, a robust approach to teaching reading comprehension. It was an incredibly popular episode and before the end of last episode I knew that I wanted to get her on again to talk about her work on Vocabulary instruction.

And this episode won’t disappoint!

Over the next two hours a wealth of ideas including: what makes vocabulary instruction robust, what does it mean to know a word, the importance of vocabulary, how to choose words to teach, how many words to teach, a vocabulary instructional sequence, and much more!

For anyone in the business of increasing students’ vocabularies, this is one not to miss.

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Links/resources mentioned in the show

  • Recommended Books
    • Bringing Words to Life – Robust Vocabulary Instruction
  • Great sources of Good vocab
    • Coxhead’s  Academic Word List (AWL)
    • ‘Academic Vocabulary List ← Davies and Gardener
  • Good dictionaries
    • Collins learners dictionary
    • Longman learner’s dictionary
    • Onelook.com ← Look up a word in 25 dictionaries
  • Best book for kids that have great words in them!
    • Phantom Tollboth
    • Tuck Everlasting
    • Roald Dahl
    • Gary Paulson
    • Kate DeCamillo
  • For younger kids
    • James Marshall
    • Team Eagan
      • Burnt toast on Davenport str ← One of these books from one of these authors. 
  • Where should teachers go to find out more about vocab instruction?
    • The Reading Teacher Journal – See article from 2020 by Manyuk and Mayuk that really went through good examples and sample scenarios and formats for instruction.
    • Judith Scott, University of California in SantaCruz, word consciousness. Helping students to develop consciousness of how authors use words. 
    • Text Project.org,  Freddy Heibert, lots of great information and sample word lists, texts, etc. 
    • Also… get on Twitter. Literacy twitter. People often share articles, blogs, etc. 
      • The Reading Forum twitter account, Melanie Kuhn (from Purdue), 
        • Great Twitter account and sites where they post articles, older articles that authors have shared, or asking authors to write brief papers summarising the field! 
        • Look around on Twitter and Facebook!
  • Other resources
    • 2020 Manyak, P. C., Manyak, A. M., & Kappus, E. M. (2021). Lessons from a decade of research on multifaceted vocabulary instruction. The Reading Teacher, 75(1), 27-39.
    • Judith Scott: The Word-Conscious Classroom
    • Text project.org, Freddie Heibert
  • Also see Ollie's book: Cognitive Load Theory in Action

This episode of the ERRR Podcast is brought to you by John Catt Educational. Use this link along with the code provided within the podcast to get 30% off all books from John Catt Educational! https://www.johncattbookshop.com/books/errr

This episode of the ERRR podcast is brought to you by Catalyst. Catalyst transforms students' lives through learning by developing excellent teachers and Leaders through evidence-based professional learning programs. Find out more at https://catalyst.cg.catholic.edu.au/

Listen to all past episodes of the ERRR podcast here.

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