![]() Another scaffold is to provide a list of words that includes some that are related to the key word and some that are not. When this happens, teachers can provide some background knowledge about the topic to get the brainstorm going. For example, the background information for students growing up in a city may not be sufficient to brainstorm many words related to the word harvest. Sometimes a new concept word will be so foreign to students that they are unable to generate many of their own words. This is a simple example, but semantic mapping can be used with any grade level, right up through high school, using a sophisticated key content word and more advanced academic vocabulary. Sometimes there will be words that are not easily grouped into a category (e.g., innings, game, summer, dugout). Once the categories are identified, students can be asked to add more words to each category. There is no “right” or “wrong” answer to this task! Sometimes one of the words on the map becomes the word for a category (e.g., uniform), and sometimes a new word needs to be generated for the category (e.g., referee, equipment). See the visual below of the categorized baseball words. ![]() Once a significant number of words has been generated, students are asked to make connections among the words and group them into categories. The visual below is an example of semantic map that was generated in a fifth grade classroom related to text students were reading that had information about baseball. The teacher or a scribe writes the words generated on the board. This brainstorming is best done as a whole class or in smaller cooperative groups. Students are then asked to brainstorm as many words as they know associated with the key word. First, the teacher chooses a key concept word that is central to the topic covered in the reading or classroom lesson and writes this word in the center of a page or on the board. There are two steps for generating a semantic map. It is highly interactive and offers opportunities for rich, collaborative discussion among students. This post will provide details for how to use Semantic Mapping (Heimlich & Pittelman, 1986) which is a well-researched activity that helps students draw on background knowledge of a topic and see connections between ideas and words related to that topic. There are four activities that are part of my professional development program titled The Key Vocabulary Routine that are designed to teach words in relation to other words: Semantic Mapping, Categorizing, Semantic Feature Analysis, and Opposites (sometimes called Scaling). Therefore, an important goal of instruction in any subject grade, in any grade, should be to help students acquire the vocabulary associated with the content and to make connections between known and unknown words. Vocabulary instruction that compares and contrasts word meanings and that activates prior knowledge not only helps students learn new words, but also has been shown to improve comprehension of a reading selection (Graves, 2006). In fact, we learn words up to four times faster in a familiar context than in an unfamiliar one (Landauer & Dumais, 1997 Hirsch, 2006). One critical finding from research is that word learning takes place most efficiently when the reader or listener already understands the context well. Knowledge helps you remember new information, and people who know a great deal about a topic also know its vocabulary.
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