Customer Reviews

Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Reading Comprehension

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I bought this piece because I am constantly looking for ways to improve my students' reading comprehension. Although Nagy's book did not provide me with any magical, miraculous fixes (the kinds of remedies all teachers seek but never find), it was a great read nonetheless. The whole piece is very brief -- a thin little treatise you can read in a couple of hours, and he doesn't waste much time giving a slew of irrelevant lesson plans and case studies. Instead, he starts with the cognitive reasons that certain vocabulary exercises do or do not work. Then he articulates what metacognitive goals the teacher should have in mind when creating vocabulary exercises. He does not spend page after page giving "sample" exercises that may or may not have any bearing in the reader's classroom. All in all, a great theoretical foundation for understanding the function of vocabulary exercises and how to get the most out of them towards better reading comprehension. It would be nice to look into other work this author has done, as well as to see what additional advances have been made in this field of research since this particular piece was published.