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Read to Children to Promote Vocabulary

Reading aloud is a great way to increase a child’s vocabulary. Books use many words that don’t often occur in everyday conversation. How often do you hear the word cupboard or cottage or porridge outside of a book? Knowing these words isn’t essential to communication, but it raises a child’s awareness that there are a lot of interesting words and a lot of different ways to express an idea.

As you read aloud to children, you can select a few words from the story to teach. Three or four is plenty. Your goal is not to select the most unusual words but to select words that could be most useful to children. For example:

• Choose words that you, as an adult, would use but that are not yet part of your students’ vocabulary.
  
• Choose words so that children will understand their definitions. For example, preschool children know what it means to be happy and they use the word "happy" in their conversations. However, "ecstatic" might be a new word for the children in your class.
  
• Choose words that are useful and have meanings your students will understand.
  
• Choose words that will expand children’s listening and speaking vocabularies, and which will later contribute to their vocabularies as readers.

Once you have selected a few words, think of how you can explain the meaning of each word in a way your students will understand. Make it a “child-friendly” definition, not a dictionary definition. You need to define the word by using other familiar words in the definition. Try to make your definition into a sentence and use words like “someone,” “something,“ or “describes” as a part of your child-friendly definition. For example, a child-friendly definition of "ecstatic" might be “Ecstatic is when someone is very happy.”

Classroom Arrangement: Play with Adult Mediation

Spaces, as well as time and opportunity, are essential to growing children’s language. Try to create small spaces in the classroom that have enough room for only three or four students. Smaller spaces encourage children to engage in longer and richer conversations with peers and adults. Think about how this might also be true for snack or meal time. Several tables that seat four will encourage more conversation and turn-taking than one long table.

In addition, daily center time is essential to language growth. While children will carry on conversations in every center in the classroom when encouraged to do so, a dramatic play center is particularly important to language growth. Dramatic play centers that are theme-based, with themes like a restaurant or flower shop, encourage children to choose roles, create a dialogue, and utilize narrative or story language. It is also important that you spend time playing with children in these centers. You can model the kinds of conversations and vocabulary that are appropriate to the play theme. You can use the same language extension strategies mentioned earlier - Comment and Wait, Ask, and Repeat and Extend to enhance children’s language use in the play centers. Remember to sit and stay and play.