Passage: p. 36 Why Is Vocabulary Instruction Important?
Vocabulary is one of five key areas of reading instruction for adolescent readers ([ 15] ). According to research, academic vocabulary knowledge affects adolescents’ access to subject-area content and predicts their overall academic achievement ([ 17] ). In addition, researchers have documented a strong relation between students’ vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension skill that persists over time ([ 6] ; [ 16] ). Despite the important role that vocabulary knowledge plays in key student outcomes, many teachers allot minimal time (if any) to explicit instruction on word meanings ([ 11] ). Explicit vocabulary instruction is necessary to improve students’ academic achievement in diverse classrooms where many students are struggling readers whose word knowledge is especially limited. Fortunately, carefully crafted, systematic vocabulary instruction improves struggling readers’ word knowledge ([ 9] ; [ 10] ; O’Connor, Beach, Sanchez, Bocian, & Flynn, 2015) and text comprehension ([ 13] ; [ 12] ). Thus, extending adolescents’ vocabulary knowledge through direct and explicit vocabulary instruction is a worthwhile endeavor for all subject area teachers, including teachers of struggling readers and students with a learning disability (LD).