Supported Vocabulary Development from Context for Children Experiencing Reading Difficulties.

The reading achievement gap is one of the most challenging and persistent problems that educators confront today. One vital area of concern is the learning of new vocabulary. It has been widely recognised that children with limited vocabularies find reading difficult, avoid reading, and learn fewer words in context. Many children with poor vocabularies will fall further behind their more able peers and develop more complex reading problems over time. It has been widely recognised that there is a close relationship between the development of vocabulary and reading comprehension. A reader’s ability to activate background knowledge to connect with information in working memory while decoding read text is crucial for the learning of new vocabulary. It would appear that students with comprehension difficulties are not deficient in general knowledge but they fail to use gap filling inferences and are not sure when and how to apply their prior knowledge to new word meanings in read text. The encoding of lexical elements requires children to attend to word forms as well as the semantic features in context. It includes contextual word-learning strategies and more intentional feature analysis. Visualisation strategies can help overcome working memory constraints and link more information to new word learning. When visual instructional techniques are applied in a multiple strategy reading program, such as KWL, they can improve children’s vocabulary development and comprehension performance. Effective vocabulary instruction takes place in a language rich environment that encourages word consciousnes