Which Vocabulary Words Should Your Child Learn? Start With Tier 2

What are Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 words?

The tiers come from vocabulary researchers Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan. In their book on vocabulary teaching, excerpted by Reading Rockets, they sort words into three groups.

• Tier 1: everyday words. Words like clock, baby, and happy. Most children pick these up from conversation, and they rarely need teaching.
• Tier 2: useful grown-up words. Words like coincidence, absurd, and industrious. The authors describe these as "high-frequency words for mature language users," the kind that turn up in many different books and subjects.
• Tier 3: specialist words. Words like isotope, lathe, and peninsula. They belong to one subject and are, in the authors' words, "probably best learned when needed in a content area." Your child's science or social studies class will handle most of these.

Tier 2 is the middle band, and it is where your practice time does the most good. These words aren't picked up casually the way Tier 1 words are, and unlike Tier 3 words, your child will meet them again and again.

How do I tell if a word is a Tier 2 word?

Beck, McKeown, and Kucan offer a simple test: ask whether your child already has a way to say the idea. If they do, the new word gives them, in the authors' words, "more precise or mature ways of referring to ideas they already know about."

Their examples make it clear. A child who says "lucky" is ready for fortunate. A child who says "kind" is ready for benevolent. A child who says "have to" is ready for required. The idea is familiar, and only the word is new.

The authors are honest that this is a judgment call, not a formula. They write that "the notion of tiers of words is not a precise one, and the lines between tiers are not clear-cut." So if you and a teacher would sort a word differently, that's normal. The question to ask is whether the word is useful and whether your child will meet it again.

Does teaching Tier 2 words actually help?

For the words that are taught, yes. In a 1982 study, Beck and colleagues taught 27 fourth graders 104 words over five months. Afterward, the taught children did significantly better on word tasks than classmates matched on their starting vocabulary and reading.

That first study found only small gains in reading comprehension, so the team ran it again with a better test. In the repeat study, fourth graders taught 104 words over five months showed "substantial advantage in all tasks," including understanding stories that used the words they had learned.

There is an honest limit here, and it's worth knowing. A 2017 review of 36 studies found that teaching word meanings helped children understand texts containing those words "in almost all cases." But the same review found "very limited evidence" that teaching words improves reading comprehension in general. In other words, the words your child practices help with the books where those words appear. Vocabulary practice is not a shortcut to higher reading scores across the board, which is one more reason to choose words your child will actually meet.

Are big words too hard for young kids?

Usually not. Beck, McKeown, and Kucan write that "there is simply no basis for determining which words students should be learning at different grade levels." A word that a frequency list calls an "eighth-grade word" only means most children don't know it until eighth grade, not that a younger child can't learn it.

They name just two things that make a word too hard: you can't explain it using words your child already knows, or it isn't useful or interesting to them. In their own classroom work, kindergartners "readily applied nuisance to disruptive classmates."

Research with young children backs this up. In a 2007 study with kindergarten and first-grade children from a low-achieving school, children whose teachers taught sophisticated words from read-aloud books learned significantly more of those words than children who weren't taught them. Those were classroom studies taught by teachers, not parents, but they show that young children can handle words like these when someone explains them.

How many vocabulary words should my child learn at a time?

A small number, practiced over several days. A federal What Works Clearinghouse practice guide gives its strongest evidence rating to teaching "a set of academic vocabulary words intensively across several days." The panel suggests "perhaps five to eight words" from a text, and warns that choosing more than 10 for this kind of deep teaching "is likely to be counterproductive," because there isn't time to teach them well. The guide was written for teachers of English learners in grades K to 8, and the number is the panel's practical advice rather than a tested limit, but the logic carries over to a word list at home.

Time spent on each word matters too. In the second part of that 2007 study, kindergarten and first-grade children were taught some words over three days and others over six days. The gains for the six-day words were twice as large.

How your child practices matters as well. The 2017 review found that instruction with "some active processing," where children have to do something with the word, was typically more effective than a definition or dictionary method alone. Reading a definition once is a start, not the finish.

What can I do at home?

You don't need a special program to put this into practice. A book your child is reading and a few minutes a day are enough.

• Pick words from what your child is already reading. Skim a chapter or picture book for words your child doesn't know but can understand with a quick, simple explanation. Those are your Tier 2 candidates.
• Use the "simpler word" test. If you can explain the word with a word your child already uses (fortunate means lucky), it's a good pick. If explaining it takes three other new words, save it for later.
• Keep the list short. Five to eight words at a time is plenty. Fewer words, practiced more deeply, beat a long list skimmed once.
• Come back over several days. Plan to revisit the same words across a week, not just the night before a quiz.
• Make your child do something with each word. Ask them to use it in a sentence about their own day, tell you which of two situations fits the word, or come up with an example. "Would you feel fortunate if you found a dollar, or if you lost one?"
• Don't worry about grade level. If the word is useful and you can explain it simply, it isn't too advanced.

How does StudySpell fit into this?

How StudySpell helps: StudySpell Pro includes vocabulary practice built from your child's own word list. You can type the words in, snap a photo of the list, or upload a file, and if a word comes without a definition, we suggest one, based on a dictionary meaning where there is one, for you to review. Your child then practices three ways: matching each word to its meaning, choosing the right meaning from a set of options, and typing the word from its definition (Pro).

That fits the "small set, several days, active practice" part of the research. Load the five to eight Tier 2 words you picked from this week's book, and your child can come back to them across the week, recalling each word rather than just rereading a definition.

Two things StudySpell doesn't do: it doesn't choose the words for you, and it doesn't put words in sentences or talk about them. Picking the words is where the tier test above comes in, and the conversation about what a word means in your child's own life is still the richest part of learning it. That part happens at home.

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