QUEENS, NYC VOCABULARY TUTORS

Aside from students with decreased vocabularies compared to peers, some students have what is called word-finding difficulties. These students often have trouble retrieving words more frequently than would be expected despite good comprehension of these words. Problems in word-finding can manifest in single-word retrieval or discourse contexts.

Single-Word Retrieval: This refers to difficulties in accessing specific words like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and numbers. At school, a student with word-finding challenges may have trouble answering questions that need a particular information or specific facts. When trying to access words, a student may be:

• slow and inaccurate
• fast but inaccurate
• slow and accurate

Discourse Retrieval: Trouble with discourse retrieval is characterized by difficulties in conversation and relating experiences and events. When speaking, a student’s speech will often be short or have behaviors associated with word-finding difficulties. These include repetitions, revisions or reformulations, substitutions, insertions, empty words, time fillers, and delays.

Word-finding difficulties are particularly common in students who have:

• specific learning disabilities
• reading difficulties
• specific language impairment
• language disorder
• fluency or stuttering problems

We use various effective techniques in our vocabulary and word-finding interventions, with in-depth procedures involving listening, speaking, and written contexts to help vocabulary development. Membean and Infercabulary can help your kids learn vocabulary and have fun at the same time. Membean’s approach to engaging interactive lessons, personalized learning, and fun challenges is designed to inspire kids’ natural curiosity about words. The Infercabulary game helps kids deduce the meaning of unfamiliar words using context clues in sentences. 

Our strategies include:

• word-mapping (graphic display of word/concept relationships)
• word substitution (teach new words related to the word found in the story, etc.)
• semantic relationships (e.g., how are the words related)
• discussion of words in a text
• incorporating techniques students can use independently
• expanding and deepening student’s knowledge of word meanings
• acting out meanings
• focusing on word structure (root words and derivations)
• reflective pausing
• imagery and gesture cues
• mass practice

At Brooklyn Letters, we use explicit teaching methods, such as pre-reviewing difficult words, repeated exposure to vocabulary in a text, and word maps. We also use implicit teaching methods by helping children build their context skills to master more vocabulary.

There is also a strong correlation between vocabulary and reading comprehension as both skills are necessary for reading success, but depend on each other. Word meanings make up a large part of comprehension, some scholars believe as high as 70 to 80%. In addition, students with large vocabularies do well across all areas of the curriculum and are able to absorb new concepts more easily important skills with the new common core curriculum.

Read about Literacy Milestones.