Word Generation incorporates the principles of vocabulary learning listed above: selecting words from semantically rich text, providing student-friendly definitions, ensuring recurrent exposure to the target words over several days, teaching explicitly about morphological structure and multiple meanings, highlighting cognates for English language learners from Romance language backgrounds, creating contexts for the active use of newly-learned words, and building word awareness to support students in learning word meanings outside the vocabulary lessons. The professional development sessions introducing Word Generation allow content area teachers to become familiar with these principles as well.
But Word Generation provides opportunities for students to learn academic language skills that go far beyond mere vocabulary acquisition through structured activities that
• generate academically productive classroom talk,
• build background knowledge about topics highlighted in the paragraphs (e.g., global warming, censorship, cloning, diabetes, the economic value of education) that supports students’ reading comprehension more generally, and
• create opportunities for debate and academically productive classroom discourse, a valuable activity in itself and a preparation for persuasive writing.
Finally, Word Generation provides weekly practice in writing a persuasive essay, a genre tested on some state assessments in seventh grade and widely cited as a middle-school student achievement standard.
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