Flinders CCC Reading for Life

Here, we define vocabulary and then put it into an educational context by further exploring the major branches, i.e. sight word vocabulary and lexical-semantic vocabulary.

This section also contains the further classification of vocabulary into tiers, containing everyday language that requires little or no instruction, literate language of books and schools not generally picked up from everyday conversation and the highest tier, being domain-specific words that do need to be explicitly taught.

This framework is presented to help teachers think about the words they teach and how to teach them. It also explores the reciprocal effects that reading and vocabulary have on one another, and how guessing when reading cannot possibly expand vocabulary. The importance of word families is also outlined and orthographic mapping is further explained.