Adult Fluency and Vocabulary

Adult Fluency and Vocabulary draws on five principles of effective vocabulary instruction from the research of Curtis and McKeown, 1987. See http://www.ncsall.net/?id=466, an article in Focus on Basics, Connecting Research and Practice, Volume 2, Issue A, May 1997, that refers to the research of McKeown, M.G., & Curtis, M.E. (eds.) (1987), The nature of vocabulary acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.) The five principles are:

1. students get numerous opportunities to learn a word's meaning;
2. words are presented in a variety of contexts;
3. students are asked to process words in active, generative ways;
4. distinctions as well as similarities among words' meanings are stressed;
5. improvement in students' ability to use words in speaking and writing, as well as to recognize their meanings, is emphasized.