CAP PREP - Blog

Book Review: Teaching Basic, Advanced, and Academic Vocabulary by Robert Marzano

3/24/2023

Introduction:
My ambition to help my students be college-ready drives me. Parents and students alike come to me with sad faces as the ACT Reading section seems to crush their souls. Where did we go wrong (as parents, students, teachers, and schools)? The focus of my research is to find solutions for Secondary Students – 6th through 12th grades. My target audience is a 16-year-old who was too interested in other things to read but now needs to make up for lost time in order to be college ready. How can we fast forward a process that naturally takes years to develop? To be candid, I was that “too busy to read teen” myself.

As an ACT tutor and English teacher for many years, my instincts tell me that vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension are the two skills I want to target in my research. With that aim in mind, here we go with my first book review!

Marzano, Marzano, Marzano. Year after year, I have listened to some very smart people refer to Robert Marzano as an expert in education research. Because of this, his book was one of the first ones I read on my quest to learn more about vocabulary acquisition.

Book Review:
Teaching Basic, Advanced, and Academic Vocabulary
by Robert J. Marzano

Teaching Basic, Advanced, and Academic Vocabulary by Robert J. Marzano was written for Kindergarten through 5th grade teachers and administrators. As a current high school CTE teacher, I found valuable information, but I am not the intended audience. The core of this framework is for teachers to engage in a school-wide initiative in direct vocabulary instruction. Robert Marzano explains the process of how and why he developed 3 tiers of vocabulary terms grouped into semantic clusters. To make a long story short, students use a notebook to rate their own comprehension of the words on a scale of 1 to 4. As students master clusters, there is a badge system proposed that would reward their efforts for gaining mastery. There are research-based methods employed as students take on a word from never hearing it to the point of being able to use them in conversation.

My challenges with the framework:

Here are some points that I would find difficult to implement. Some of my students don’t always tell the truth. (Shocking! I know.) If we created a badge system that rewarded students based on theirself-reporting of mastery, it challenges me to understand how that would play out in the real world. Also, some of my students will not do work unless a grade is attached to the effort, and sometimes when there is a grade, the work still doesn’t happen. Maybe these K-5th grade teachers do give grades in connection with the tasks, but he does not mention that in the book. Self-reflection is undeniably beneficial, but I can’t picture a classroom of students taking on a yearlong project of vocabulary growth based on giving a rating of their knowledge of a word without an incentive like a grade. Now, I don’t teach the intended K-5th grade audience. This could be the biggest cause of my disconnect from this framework. They may experience student engagement at a different level.

Immediate takeaways:

Despite my cynicism on those points, I am so glad I read this book. I found lots of valuable information that could quickly be applied to my classroom. Here is a recap of some wisdom I want to glean. Here is a note on wide reading that I want to remember for the future:

“Vocabulary instruction experts William E. Nagy and Patricia A. Herman (1987) explained that if students spend twenty-five minutes per day reading at a rate of two hundred words per minute for two hundred days, they will encounter about a million words” (Marzano, p.2).

Also, The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development identified in 1997 key areas for reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. They acknowledged in the report that the expansion of vocabulary is a lifetime process. As I study more, I want to keep these core areas in mind. I'm finding that phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency are skills developed more intentionally in those K-3rd grade years.

Marzano and his team reviewed a number of meta-analytic studies on the effects of direct vocabulary instruction and found an overall effect size of 0.88, which leads to an increase of 31 percentile points in language development (Marulis & Neuman, 2010). In other words, a student at the 50th percentile would be bumped up to the 81st percentile after direct vocabulary instruction according to their findings.

Not all words are equal. Beck and McKeown (1985) developed three tiers of vocabulary terms based on frequency and on their functions in use (p. 4). Tier 1 and tier 2 words are more commonly addressed in K-5th grades, whereas tier 3 words are more subject-matter related and are best targeted in the subject where they naturally occur. For example, a science teacher could take on more explicit vocabulary instruction as he or she puts the words in their context. In Marzano’s words, “Educators should teach all teir 3 terms in the context of specific subject-matter topics. Stated differently, educators should not teach tier 3 terms in isolation” (p. 38).

When the book Teaching Basic, Advanced, and Academic Vocabulary explains the process of making it a school-wide initiative, I think it’s best to hear it straight from the author.

“A schoolwide plan’s design should ensure all students have a working knowledge of tier one terms by at least grade 5, and a working knowledge of the tier two terms in the student notebook by grade 5. This can be done by having teachers at different grade levels identify those clusters their grade level will be responsible for. For example, first-grade teachers might be responsible for clusters 1– 100, second-grade teachers would be responsible for clusters 101– 200, and so on. ... Third-grade teachers might collectively decide they will be responsible for teaching a unit on oceans.”

Marzano and his team’s efforts to identify tier 1 and tier 2 terms spanned over three decades. He has them organized them into 444 semantic clusters giving students context for that initial process of understanding new words. For example, tier 1 would include a cluster such as lake, ocean, and river, and teir 2 would include a cluster with brook, cove, and marsh.

He recognizes four types of vocabulary that involve our oral and written abilities and receptive and productive capacities.

Words understood when heard.
Words used in speech
Words understood when read
Words used in writing

In Marzano’s process, students will have a notebook (paper or digital) to record their understanding of a word on a scale of 1 to 4 with clear descriptions attached to each number. (p. 25)

I understand even more about the term than I was taught.
I understand the term, and I’m not confused about any part of what it means.
I’m a little uncertain about what the term means, but I have a general idea.
I’m a little uncertain about what the term means, but I have a general idea.

As a CTE teacher, I could see these statements working well as an exit ticket with words listed in a google form and these three statements as a multiple choice option. Marzano recommends using the Collins COBUILD dictionary online to help deliver a definition that is more conversational. I could see me using this in the future.

Marzano recommends using four levels of badges ranging from bronze to platinum for the mastery of the clusters as recorded in self-evaluation; the rewards start at 100 clusters up to all 420 clusters mastered. This system is harder for me to see play out, but this could be that I haven’t reached that level of teaching mastery. The book makes note of an assessment that students can take on the front end of this process to give them a starting point in the clusters, but it doesn’t mention a post-test. Students are instructed to quickly look at words prior to their diagnosed starting point in a process Marzano calls “backfilling.” This helps to prevent gaps, and the process of looking at the words, again and again, helps to reinforce understanding.

There is a particular section that was eye-opening for me, and I'm bringing in a direct quote to keep all the facts straight.

“Researchers William E. Nagy and Patricia A. Herman (1984) found that students from families of different socioeconomic status (SES) had consistent differences in the sizes of their vocabulary. ... Specifically, they estimated a 4,700-word difference in vocabulary size between high and low-SES students (Nagy & Herman, 1984). ... Hart and Risley (1995) estimated the differences in vocabulary development due to family SES for children between the ages of ten and thirty-six months and included three socioeconomic groups: (1) welfare families , (2) working-class families , and (3) professional families . ... Hart and Risley (1995) estimated thirty-six-month-old children from welfare families had about 70 percent of the vocabulary of children from working-class families and only about 45 percent of the vocabulary of children from professional families. ...
Hart and Risley (2003) concluded students from families on welfare enter school having heard approximately thirty million fewer words than students from professional families” (Hart & Risley, 2003, p. 4).

Another team of researchers noted that direct vocabulary instruction closed the gap between ELs and native speakers by 50 percent when assessing vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (p. 30).

Marzano shares his framework for direct vocabulary instruction that he has developed and taught over the years, and this book gives examples of how that system can play out with the three tiers of vocabulary terms. Here are Marzano's six steps:

Provide a description, an explanation, or an example of the new term.
Ask students to restate the description, explanation, or example in their own words.
Ask students to construct a picture, symbol, or graphic representing the term or phrase.
Periodically engage students in activities that help them add to their knowledge of the terms to which they have previously been exposed.
Periodically ask students to discuss the terms with one another.
Periodically involve students in games that allow them to play with terms. (Marzano et al., 2015)

I found this section very instructive and would recommend reading it in detail multiple times as it gives scenarios every teacher encounters. It even breaks down how different parts of speech should be taught differently – brilliant! I especially found it insightful as I considered making tier 3 words more relevant to my EL students.

All-in-all I’m glad I read this book because I was able to apply it the very next day into my classroom instruction. It builds my teacher and tutor confidence to know that I’m helping my students in a way that is backed by research. This is one that I could justify keeping on the shelf and revisiting it once a year to refine my craft in vocabulary instruction.

Marzano, R. J. (2020). Teaching basic, advanced, and academic vocabulary: a comprehensive framework for elementary instruction. Marzano Resources.