Vocabulary Instruction

Teaching vocabulary is something that all English teachers are going to have to do to some degree in their classrooms. My cooperating teacher has an interesting way to teach vocabulary – it is called CSSD. (Context – Structure - Sound & Definition).

This is a sentence that was demonstrated on the board for my 8th graders, “When I retire, I plan to live at the beach in a peaceful, picturesque setting.” The students then drew three boxes side by side in their notebooks, one for context, one for structure (root word), and one for sound. Then we went over the sentence. The kids looked for words in picturesque that sounded like any other words they had heard – they came up with “picture.” They also thought the word picturesque could be broken down into the root word “picture.” Then the students went to the sentence to look for context clues. They came up with “beach” and “peaceful” and they thought the sentence described a place that was “happy” and “beautiful.” From those three boxes, the students create their own definition, which was “like a beautiful picture.” After doing this with all their vocabulary words they look them up in the dictionary to see how accurate they were.

This is by no means a full proof way to teach vocabulary, but it is really a good way to get students looking at the word and the sentence(s) around it to try and use context clues to make sense of a word they do not know. Not every box in the CSSD method will be used with every word and that took a few practice tries for students to see that. I think that once students get a feel for how to use the CSSD it could be very useful for them and something they can do in their head eventually once it becomes more of a habit to them. This technique will be helpful for them when they are reading individually as well as trying to determine a definition on an SOL test. When it come time to test the 8th graders, my cooperating teacher gives them a test that is a little more advanced than a fill in the blank/matching test. The vocabulary tests usually take a vocabulary word and then have the student pick the synonym or the antonym in the form of multiple choice questions. I think this shows if the students really do grasp the concept of the word – often times student are also asked to use the word in a sentence they create themselves.


As the book says, I really do think that books and reading are a key way to strengthen vocabulary knowledge, and many times kids do not even know they are learning new words. I also think audio-assisted readings are a great idea for the classroom. This has been done in the middle school I am working at and it gives kids a chance to follow along and the reader can set the mood and enunciate words that a child might not be able to figure out. This also has the downfall of students zoning out, but I think it is important to stop the tape at specific point and go back and discuss to make sure students are understanding and are staying on task. Finally, it is important that students have multiple encounters with new words. The contexts of new words need to be meaningful as well as useful. For a student to really remember a word, they need to ad detail to the word, make associations/elaborate on it, as well as see it in multiple situations.