According to Steven Pinker, the average high school graduate knows 60,000 different words. If this is true, the student must have acquired, not learned, most of this vocabulary. Interestingly, Miller and Gildea estimated that young children between the ages of four and six acquire an average of fourteen new words every day. At that rate, a child would pick up more than five thousand new words per year!
So, how can we help English learners acquire new vocabulary at a similar rate to that of a native English speaker? A good approach to helping students build concepts and vocabulary needed to read texts is FRONTLOADING. "Frontloading involves learning about something, talking about it, wondering about it, and then reading and writing about it" (Freeman & Freeman , 2004, p. 198). Frontloading and other prereading activities should be designed to help students build background knowledge instead of just focusing on the words themselves. The students will acquire vocabulary as they read.
Freeman, D. E. and Freeman, Y. S. (2004). Essential linguistics: What you need to know to teach reading, ESL, spelling, phonics, grammar. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
For more ideas, check out http://www.colorincolorado.org/educators/teaching/vocabulary/
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