The Brain Science of Vocabulary Growth
When I was a student decades ago, my teachers gave me vocabulary lists every Monday. They quizzed me on the new words every Friday. I always crammed on Thursday evenings, aced those tests, and then forgot the words by Saturday morning. My teachers were assigning me vocabulary, but they weren’t teaching it to me.
There’s a better way to grow kids’ vocabularies. To understand it, let’s look at what the brain science says about the vocabulary acquisition process.
We all have two types of long-term memory. Procedural long-term memory is where skills like driving and riding a bike live in our minds. We don’t need to do these activities daily, monthly, or even yearly to remember them. Those abilities are safely stored in our procedural long-term memory. We also have a nonprocedural long-term memory. That’s where words that we really know live. We don’t need to use these words regularly to remember them and their meanings. This is the level of word recognition we want our new students to achieve.
To move new vocabulary words into students’ nonprocedural long-term memories, we need to go through a few steps. First, we prime students for these words; maybe we start using them in our lessons or we put them up on a word wall. Then we formally introduce the new words to students so they know how to pronounce them, their definitions, synonyms, and antonyms. We offer the new words’ parts of speech and use them in sentences to foster the “encoding” stage. Then we give students opportunities to practice with these words, so they can move to the “storage” stage. Finally, we continue to have students recall these words over an extended period, so that the new vocabulary jumps to the “retrieval” stage. Voila: Long-term memory storage achieved!
In Zinc, we make this process seamless with our spaced-repetition model. In it, students are introduced to new words, practice them, and then see them SIX times over about two months, with the spaces between exposures getting longer as they go. This gives students the chance to almost forget the new words and then recall them. This process gets those words into long-term memory.
Want to try Zinc’s spaced-repetition model with your students? Assign a vocab set today.