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.

Introduction to Adult Fluency and Vocabulary, Mar. 2007, 3 minutes
Wendy Quinones, Community Learning Center, Cambridge, MA
This segment introduces the teaching technique used and gives information about the students for the segments below.

Adult Fluency and Vocabulary, Difficult Abstract Words, Part 1
Mar. 2007, 5 minutes

The teaching technique used in this video, created by Lesley University’s Mary Beth Curtis, is called Adult Fluency and Vocabulary (AFV). The teacher, Wendy Quinones, also refers to the Adult Reading Components Study (ARCS) .

Adult Fluency and Vocabulary, Difficult Abstract Words, Part 2
Mar. 2007, 5 minutes
This segment accompanies the segment above. It introduces the word, “metaphor.”

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