Looking at the 7th chapter in The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1936 by Christopher Paul Curtis, “Every Chihuahua in America Lines Up to Take a Bite out of Byron,” I can find some examples of Tier 1 (basic), Tier 2 (academic), and Tier 3 (specialized) words.
Tier 1 words (Basic words) are common words that are used socially, in informal conversations at home and on the play ground. These words require little instruction for meaning from Native English speakers.
Examples: animal, clean, laughing, guitar, harmonica, worries, nightmare, unfair, celebrates,
Examples from The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963: potatoes, surprised, challenged, imaginary, door, steps, broom, hospital
Tier 2 words (Academic words) are words used more frequently in writing than speaking. Students need to learn them because they are used in the curriculum. Students usually understand the general concept represented by the word, but they don’t recognize the specific word.
Examples: community, evidence, greedy, ordinary, spirit, desperate, original, sorrow, tragedy
Examples from The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963: automatically, confess, easing, tolerate,
Tier 3 words (Specialized words) are words that are content-specific or abstract, and they aren’t used very frequently.
Examples: minuend, osmosis, suffrage, drought, Dust Bowl stock market, Great Depression, unions, unsanitary
Examples from The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963: conk, butter, squares, boo-hooing, TT AB-700, brown bomber, dustpan
I think the Tier 3 (specialized) words are the most important words to teach about for the book. Even though I haven’t finished it yet, I remember from reading it when I was younger, and I can sense from the back, that there will be social injustices in the story that will require discussing and explanations. There are also many words that some students probably won’t have seen before because they are cultural from that time or just something they wouldn’t have a reason to know. It is also a historical fiction book, so much of the events that will happen when the family goes to
I am reading “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes” for my book club novel. For this blog post, I examined chapter six. I had a hard time determining specialized words because I felt that the book almost avoided them. The following are my lists of words for each tier.
ReplyDeleteTier 1:
Biggest
homework
Letters
Friends
Games
Paper
Tier 2:
Gradually
Disease
Throbbing
Spells (from dizzy spells)
Especially
Tiring
Poison
Crane
Tier 3: (I included a couple word pairs because of the medical use)
Atom bomb
Leukemia
Blood count
Star island (referring to heaven)
I definitely agree with you about the importance of Tier 3. I feel like the Tier 2 and Tier 3 words are both important to focus on in order to help students understand the book. The Tier 3 words are especially important because they are words or phrases that refer specifically to what happened in Japan and the results of it. The events of WWII and the atomic bomb are a crucial part of the story and in order for students to understand the background, they need to have an understanding of these words. As the book says, these technical words are content-specific and aren’t used frequently enough to devote time to teaching except as part of thematic units. And I think that this book would be used as part of a thematic unit. I think that the Tier 2 words are then important because they help students understand the concepts that come from Tier 3. It seems like most of them are description words. These types of words seem to be ones that students could figure out more from context and not need as much instruction and focus. According to Tompkins, students often understand the general concept represented by the word, but they don’t recognize the specific word. So, these would still be important to focus on because it helps the students gain more vocabulary. The book says that researchers recommend that teachers focus on the words in the second tier. While I definitely agree with this, I feel like for my book, the third tier is just as important.
Personally, I think that there are only so many new vocabulary words that a student can take in at a time. I think that because of this, it is best to just pick one tier to focus on. Which tier you want to focus on would probably depend on the students that you are teaching. I agree with both of you that tier one words are probably not as important to focus on because the students probably already know most of them (unless you have a lot of ELLs in your class). I also agree that tier three words can be important in understanding some stories, but those are words that students will not see as often, so I honestly think that they are not as important for students to study as tier two words. In the younger grades, as students are still developing their vocabularies, I would definitely focus on tier two words because they occur often, both in school and in books. However, my fifth graders already have pretty large vocabularies and would probably not need to look up the tier two words to know what they mean. In their case, I would probably focus on expanding their vocabulary even more using the tier three words.
ReplyDeleteHere are some examples from Chapter 24 of Crossing the Wire by Will Hobbs:
Tier 1
Drank, climbed, south, minutes, water, turned, radio, luck, anger, voice, sleep, night, work, rifle, rock, soccer, faster, bounced, waiting, quit, kicked, bullets, beef, shadows, pointing
Tier 2
Hastily, ridge, replied, suspected, winding, unsteadily, unconvincingly, strewn, rubble, stumbling, nick of time, pinned, exposed, boulder, retreat, evening, reservation
Tier 3
Patrolman, switchbacks, deported, illegals, smugglers, mules, outflank, butcher, El Cristo Rey