Vocabulary and Comprehension

A Chicken or Egg Problem

As Bakhtin deduced from his analysis of literature a century ago, nobody owns words. We rent them for the moment to sustain us and routinely give them away or sublet them for a time. Words that come from my hands or mouth or pen have also been in your hands, mouth, or pen. We pass on words on behalf of ourselves in the world with others.

We live inside words, and words live inside us. We can’t own them anymore than we can own the air we breathe. We inhale and exhale words. So to say that we “acquire vocabulary” is a bit misleading. To say that we have “mastered it” is a distortion. If anything, vocabulary masters us.

Vocabulary itself, the word, is linked to action, not stillness. Inside it is voice, advocacy, vocation. When we search for words to rent, borrow, and use in the moment, we don’t search for a dictionary, a list of words with definitions in alphabetical order, pinned to a display like tree leaves in a science exhibit.

So to teach vocabulary, we ought properly to view this noun as a verb. Dictionary is not a repository for edicts or mandates or requirements but a hope for intelligent cooperation and progress. A lexicon is a warehouse, lexicographers, warehouse workers. Students in our classrooms are not lexicographers collecting specimens, but renters and borrowers of words just like us.

What is the relationship between vocabulary and comprehension? Isn’t this question a part of the question ‘What is the relationship between vocabulary and literacy?’ “Literacy can only be known to us in forms which already have political and ideological significance,” wrote Street (1984, 1995, pg. 8), “and it cannot, therefore, be helpfully separated from that significance and treated as though it were an ‘autonomous thing.’”¹

Philosophers of language like John Searle pried open the aperture and investigated the relationship between vocabulary and power. Consider a word like ‘abortion’ in the hands of Samuel Alito. When a word like ‘electricity’ comes from the mouth of a licensed electrician, it has more wattage than the same word from my neighbor, who is a podiatrist. The same is true when a word comes from the mouth of a credentialed teacher with a license to dispense academic capital.

Do you know the meaning of electricity?

Street (1984, 1995) on the same page as the previous quote wrote about literacy lessons we learn not from the content our teachers provide, but from the process they enact to teach that content: “[T]he processes whereby reading and writing are learnt are what construct the meaning of it for particular practitioners.”

When we teach vocabulary as packets of meaning to stuff into a vault and retrieve upon command, we teach subservience. Paulo Freire called this the banking concept of teaching. Such teaching is the rubber band in teacher preparation, the force that compels new teachers to become like their former teachers, the force that Socrates strove to subvert when he resisted the Oracle’s proclamation of Socrates himself as the wisest of men. He spent his life proving the Oracle wrong.

What is missing from vocabulary instruction taught as memory work rather than social participation is learner agency. Teaching words in lists as grist for rote learning saturates learners with the notion that their work is technical, mechanical, not social, cultural, ideological.

In content-area reading instruction, vocabulary and its treatment is central to both content and habits of mind. When I worked with preservice teachers seeking a single-subject credential, I asked them to unpack their ideas about the role of vocabulary in comprehension and retention of content through self-teaching, i.e., reading. Common sense is that vocabulary is instrumental in comprehension. Readers have to know what the words mean before they can comprehend a passage. Therefore, teaching students vocabulary before they read causes them to better comprehend passages using those words. Here is what the National Reading Panel (2000) had to say on this issue:

If knowing a lot of vocabulary isn’t a cause of comprehension yet is related, what is the nature of the relationship? Could comprehension ability be the cause of vocabulary growth?

In my content-area reading methods course, I took this opportunity to facilitate preservice teacher agency. I wasn’t the first teacher to ask the following question, but ask it I did: If I were to randomly select 10,000 people and measure them by height in inches and also on intelligence on some numerical measure, I would expect to find a positive correlation. That is, as the distribution of measurement in inches increases (people’s measurements are arranged from shorter to taller), measures of intelligence tend to increase as well. Shorter people are correlated with fewer units of intelligence.

Does this pattern mean that taller people are more intelligent than shorter people? Does being tall cause increases in intelligence? We know that people who measure up in comprehension also measure up in vocabulary size and vice versa. Is the relationship spurious, an artifact of the existential proposition that all things are contingent in some way on all other things in meaningless perpetuity?

What is the likelihood that among my 10,000 randomly selected people, some of them would be children? Are children shorter than adults? Is it not true that with the passing of time we see increased height as well as increased intelligence? So the explanation has nothing to do with height or intelligence in a relationship. An underlying third factor is at play: Development over time. As readers improve their capacity to comprehend, they improve their vocabulary. As they improve their vocabulary, they improve their capacity to comprehend.

This insight has enormous implications for classroom teachers. First, teaching vocabulary one word at a time is a fool’s errand. Such teaching is based on a naive assumption. Second, providing active experiences in how to learn and organize vocabulary in the context of comprehension holds promise. Third, sharing the power of agency with learners affords them the cognitive space to grasp the significance of vocabulary and comprehension as a foundation for how we come to occupy roles of influential presence (think Samuel Alito) and interact within history, culture, and society. To view reading as a technical matter is to mistake the proverbial trees for the forest.

1. Street, Brian (1984, 1994, 1995). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press.