Expansions: Introduction

Expansions: A Book of Vocabulary Games by Peter Smagorinsky and Cindy O'Donnell-Allen
How to Use this Book

The heart of this book is a set of six games designed to give students experience in constructing word meanings in collaborative settings. Each activity depends on a different strategy (or combination of strategies) for expanding vocabulary:
Strategy combines context clues with either knowledge of roots and affixes or knowledge of semantic networks
Root it Out relies on knowledge of roots and affixes outside the context of usage
Context requires students both to create contexts and determine meanings from them
Neologism! gives students opportunities to construct new words from an array of roots and affixes
Pyramid is based on students' abilities to create semantic networks and communicate a word's "meaning" in a variety of ways
Etymology enables students to use their imagination to determine word origins.
The following sections discuss concerns in implementing the activities in typical secondary school classes.
Appropriate Grade Level
            We have used these activities with great success with students in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades, and with students in basic, regular, and honors tracks. Your own application of the activities may depend on the grade level of the students you teach, how vocabulary is taught throughout the rest of your school, the constraints of your curriculum, and the knowledge and ability of your students.
Methods of Implementing Activities
            We next describe two methods of using the activities in a typical classroom. In the first method, you can use Expansions as a complete text without relying on other texts or materials. In the second method, Expansions serves as a source book to be used in conjunction with other vocabulary texts of the sort frequently found in secondary school curricula.
Method #1: Expansions as a Complete Text
            Used as a complete text, Expansions provides activity descriptions, activity words, words for testing in Appendix A, and suggestions for alternative methods of assessing vocabulary growth. The words that we provide for the activities tend to be on the unusual side. We have found that most students delight in trying to determine the meanings of "misodoctakleidist" (one who hates to practice the piano), "defenestrate" (to throw out a window) and countless others. In determining the meanings of such words students are participating in the process of deciphering meaning, and over the course of the year encounter various roots and affixes in many combinations and contexts. Even though they might rarely use "xanthocroid" (blond haired person) or see it in print, they might better be able to determine the meaning of "anthropoid," and then "anthropology," and then "logology," and then "logophile," and so on.
            Some might object that most students would never use the words that we provide in the activities, and that therefore they are inappropriate vehicles for teaching vocabulary growth. We would point out that we know the meanings of many words that we rarely speak or write ourselves; we can recognize "pusillanimous" and "chimerical" when we see or hear them but rarely if ever speak or write them on our own. We "use" words when we read as well as when we think, speak or write. In that we can not foresee which words students are likely to encounter and which they will not, we think it shortsighted to limit vocabulary activities only to those words that we anticipate they will "use." Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, like most of his fiction, includes a number of words rarely spoken by even the most articulate of us: ailanthus, hoicked, scut, smore, derring, guttapercha, interstice, farrier, creosote, carborundum, apotheosis, facetiae, vide, adumbrating, inexpugnable, saturnine, perspicuant, ineluctable, peignoir, revetment, proscenium, pretermission, vicegeral, arrogate and others. Yet readers of Faulkner and other challenging literature must "use" these words if they are to comprehend the story. Literary greats are not the only writers and speakers who use polysyllabic or obscure words; we have found "somnambulant" and "somnolent" in comic books and popular music, and "Sominex" in the pharmacy. We also "use" words when we extrapolate to understand meaning in new circumstances. While we might never speak the word "misodoktekleidist," we might "use" our knowledge of its meaning to help determine the meaning of "misanthropist."
            In and of itself, then, this book provides includes activities that involve students in the analysis of unusual (and often sesquipidalian) words, and provides possible words for evaluation (in Appendix A) that include the same elements. Teachers who wish to develop their own activities, or modify the activities to suit their own purposes, are provided with a series of additional roots and affixes in Appendix B.
Method #2: Expansions with Standard Vocabulary Texts
            We also offer a way to implement these activities in conjunction with standard vocabulary texts so that they are more compatible with typical curricula, and so that teachers may use the activities with different grade levels without duplicating the experiences. We have devised the activities so that they correspond with the lessons in one standard text, Harold Levine's Vocabulary for the College-Bound Student (2nd Edition) (VCBS).
Programatic Implementation
            In our experience the activities work best as a year-length vocabulary program. We have used them so that students participate in the activities every other Friday, and are evaluated in some fashion the following Friday. Implemented this way, students would participate in each activity about three times over the course of the year. Such a pace enables students to spiral through the strategies embedded in the various activities, returning more knowledgeably with each cycle, and to diversify the experiences so that no single activity grows stale.
            Following we identify special considerations in implementing the program:
Situating the Activities with Relation to other Language Arts Experiences
            Teachers face a dilemma regarding the need to situate instruction in meaningful activities while at the same time teaching students particular skills. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that school itself an inherently artificial situation, thereby making it virtually impossible to engage students in authentic academic activities that genuinely flow in a "natural" context. Our goal, therefore, is to structure the class to encourage students to make connections between the knowledge gained through the program and the ways in which they use language in other contexts.
            An inherent challenge in helping students connect their school knowledge to other arenas of their experience stems from the vexing problem of promoting knowledge transfer. Many theorists (i.e., Brown, Collins and Duguid, 1989) have argued that knowledge is so heavily situated in the context in which we learn it that we rarely export knowledge to new, and therefore different, situations. The problem of knowledge transfer has been explored extensively in cognitive psychology (i.e., Detterman and Sternberg, in press) and literacy studies (i.e., Smagorinsky and Smith, 1992) with no resolution to the question of how easily we transfer knowledge from situation to situation. Obviously, we transfer some knowledge quite easily: In writing this manuscript, for instance, we are drawing on knowledge gained from an extensive series of previous writing experiences. Psychologists have termed the transfer of knowledge between situations that closely resemble one another "near transfer." More problematic is "far transfer," which requires us to bring prior knowledge to bear on new and quite different situations. Researchers have found that the application of school-learning to "real life" represents far transfer for most students, and therefore requires special attention in order to take place (Perkins and Salomon, 1988).
            Perkins and Salomon have argued that one critical factor in transferring knowledge is to have a mindful attitude. Learners who are mindful approach learning with "intentional, purposeful, metacognitively guided employment of non-automatic, hence effort-demanding, mental processes"; more simply stated, it is a "package of partly motivational states and partly cognitive actions, a mixture of will and skill" (Salomon, 1987, p.6). Mindful learners make a concerted effort to look for applications of previously-learned knowledge, even when the opportunities to do so are not immediately apparent. Salomon has found that students rarely think mindfully unless routinely and rigorously cued to do so. Our job as teachers, therefore, becomes to help draw explicit attention to ways in which students can apply knowledge and skills that they learn in class to appropriate areas of their lives, and to make the classroom learning environment as natural and lifelike as possible.
            We will next suggest a number of ways in which teachers can promote opportunities for students to connect vocabulary study with other language arts activities. We would advocate making the connections as clear as possible so that students can see and then begin to look for opportunities to apply knowledge and skills in a variety of contexts. In developing the proposals for situating vocabulary study in natural language use, we have kept in mind the following questions:
            1. What words do students need to know?
            2. What words do students know that other people should know?
            3. What special vocabulary do students require to communicate in particular situations?
            4. What does that special vocabulary reveal about the concepts and conventions shared by particular audiences?
            5. How can students make connections themselves between the Language Arts classroom and other arenas of language usage?
6. Isn't The Grandiloquent Dictionary a cool book?
            Reading logs. Teachers whose students keep reading logs could encourage students to attend to language in their reflections about their reading. The log entries could include specific application of comprehension strategies (i.e., determining meaning from context), attention to connotation, noting of consistent stylistic patterns (such as Poe's dark imagery) and so on.
            Setting vocabulary goals. Classes that follow a student-centered format such as the Writing Workshop (i.e., Atwell, 1987) could encourage students to set goals regarding vocabulary growth. Setting vocabulary goals could help students become more mindful in their attention to vocabulary and perhaps contribute to a greater commitment on the part of the class to expanding vocabulary.
            Student-run activities. Instead of relying on this book or another vocabulary text as a source of words for activities and evaluations, you could have the activities be run by teams of students. This approach would be particularly effective when the activity organizes words according to clusters of words. For Pyramid, for instance, a group of students from student council might provide the six categories of elections, executive branch, judiciary, administration, congress, and budget. The words that they generate for each category could be strictly political ("filibuster"), generally used ("fiduciary), or recent coinages ("telegenic"). You could rotate the responsibility so that different groups of students have an opportunity to share their interests and words with their classmates, so that students from the 4-H Club, athletes, automobile enthusiasts, war buffs, students of foreign languages, quilters, music lovers, and students with all sorts of other interests can have an opportunity to share their expertise with their classmates.
            Slang dictionaries. Students could prepare dictionaries that guide their parents and teachers through the intricacies of teenage language. The dictionaries could provide the rudiments of the sorts of information that we find in published dictionaries: pronunciation key, part of speech, etymology, and definitions. Students have a great deal of fun working together to identify the terms that they feel are exclusive to their own community of speakers, and explain them to an ignorant audience of adults.
            Relate activities to upcoming literature. At the beginning of a literature unit in which students will undoubtedly be unfamiliar with many of the words, teachers could identify potentially troublesome words from the literature and incorporate them into the activities. The activity Context, for instance, might be especially effective prior to reading Shakespeare, helping students to practice using context clues as a comprehension strategy in conjunction with attention to Elizabethan language of the text.
            In George Carlin's well-known routine contrasting baseball with football, he notes that the language of the two sports reveals a great deal about their place in American culture. Football is played in a stadium; baseball is played in a park. In football we throw the bomb; in baseball we want to go home. In football we blitz; in baseball we sacrifice. Carlin's routine could help draw attention to the consistency of language in characterizing the subjects of our speech and writing, and the importance of the concepts underlying the linguistic choices we make. Teachers could encourage students to attend to the metaphors and terminology that we have developed to describe different pastimes and industries, and perhaps develop clusters for the different activities according to their connotations. Method #2 for Strategy, for instance, clusters words according to various themes. Teachers could identify clusters that characterize a series of industries and substitute them for those we suggest in Method #2. The computer industry, for instance, has developed a very mechanical and technical language to describe its products and processes; professional wrestling relies on a combative nomenclature. To engage students in the generation of the activity materials, you could have different groups of students develop the categories and terms for the "game board" in Strategy or for the clusters required in other activities.
            We would suggest following this sort of attention to connotation with explicit analysis of texts taken from the students' own worlds. Students could analyze the language of advertisements of different products in different sorts of magazines; analyze the characterization of the same issue by both a liberal and a conservative columnist; examine the metaphors and images used in love songs by both a heavy metal rocker and a bubble gum rocker; and so on.
            Posters. Students could prepare posters that illustrate vocubulary from the activities, literature read for class, outside reading, extracurricular activities and so on. Students can thus make important contributions to the classroom ambiance and provide steady reinforcement to the place of language in their lives.
Evaluation
            Evaluation is often the downfall of learning because even though students have broadened their knowledge and increased their ability, the assessment does not enable them to show it. Vocabulary is particularly vulnerable to this problem due to the nature of most evaluations. Testing students on vocabulary words can be highly problematic because, as Nagy points out, "definitions as an instructional device have substantial weaknesses and limitations that must be recognized and corrected" (p.7). Often students do not understand the definitions that they copy from dictionaries and thus potentially are engaging in pointless memorization exercises when they take vocabulary tests. Definitions also give little idea of how to use a word; we see this when students write context sentences and use nouns as adjectives, verbs as nouns and so on. Furthermore, definitions do little to convey the concepts that words represent in particular contexts. As Nagy argues, the primary goal of vocabulary instruction "is not to teach students new labels, but to teach them new concepts" (p.21). Finally, definitions often fail to capture the feeling behind a word. In reading "Beauty and the Beast" to our children, one of us came across the word "clenched" to describe Gaston's reaction to being spurned by Belle. The best way to convey its meaning was to accompany a clenched fist with a fierce facial expression, a "definition" which the children immediately understood. Our dictionary, on the other hand, defines "clenched" with:
            v.t. 1. to clinch, as a nail. 2. to bring together tightly; close firmly, as the teeth or fist. 3. to grip tightly. n. 1. a firm grip. 2. a device that clenches.
            The dictionary, as it typically does, provides a deliberately dispassionate explanation for an inherently passionate term. In this instance a nonverbal expression was clearly a better means of communicating the meaning of the word, thereby illustrating an important limitation of written definitions in helping students understand vocabulary terms.
            Even so, written definitions are often the most convenient medium we have for assessing vocabulary knowledge, and can be sufficient for establishing the meaning of certain words for certain purposes. In Appendix A we have provided an extended glossary of words you could use for conventional vocabulary tests. We present the words and their definitions as a rudimentary attempt to provide meanings for words and not an exclusive authority, and do so with some misgivings in light of our own reservations about the value of definition-based vocabulary tests. Teachers should be open to other ways of "defining" words; we urge you not to rely exclusively on testing through definitions as a means of assessing vocabulary growth. In providing alternative means of vocabulary evaluation, we have attempted to situate the assessments in the "real world" of student communication.
            We will now suggest several means of assessing vocabulary growth, including conventional testing.
            Conventional testing. One way to evaluate students' understanding of vocabulary is to give a conventional vocabulary test, issuing 10-20 words and having students provide definitions and perhaps context sentences. Test words could come from the activities themselves, from the text book used in conjunction with the activities, or from the test words listed in Appendix A. We have found that testing students on words related to the words from the activities, but not included in them, enables students to apply their knowledge in new contexts, and to get important practice in using dictionaries. If the activity includes "rurigenous" (born in the country), you might test students on "indigenous" or "rural." Appendix A provides extensive word lists from which you could devise tests on words related to those found in the activities. The appendix is organized alphabetically by prefixes, roots and affixes so you can easily locate words related to those in the activities.
            One fun way to conclude a vocabulary test (regardless of how it is administered) is by issuing a bonus vocabulary word, worth some generous amount of points. The issuance of a bonus word could follow the format for the party game "Fictionary" (Smagorinsky and Slaby, 1986). The word should be sufficiently obscure that few if any students would know it; we have prepared the list of Bonus vocabulary words in Appendix C from some of our favorite books such as Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words and Susan Sperling's Poplollies and Bellibones. At the end of the test you can issue the word and have students define it and put it in a context sentence. Then collect the papers and read all of the guesses. Students generally have a great deal of fun sharing the originality of their classmates in guessing the meaning of words such as "hirsutorufous"; the only potential problem is the tendency of some students to write tasteless and inappropriate definitions, which you can discourage by subtracting points or prohibiting further participation in the bonus situation. After reading all the guesses you can reveal the correct definition, in this case "having red hair." We have found that students will be motivated to write more imaginative definitions if you reward their originality with bonus points, perhaps up to 5% of the total test value, even if their answer is wrong. The bonus word is a way to bring some word play into vocabulary study and end a test (and perhaps the week) in a positive way.
            Examples from outside reading. Students could copy excerpts from their outside reading and identify words that include the affixes and roots or other semantic features from the previous week's activity. If the activity has included the prefix "mono" as in "monophobia" (fear of being alone), then the student might copy a selection from an outside novel, a text book from another class, a newspaper, or other source that includes a word such as "monogram" or "monolithic" and provide a definition that describes its meaning in context. You might accept pictorial definitions as well as those that are verbal. You could specify a particular number of words the students need to identify, possibly the same number as you would typically test them on.
            Creating an original text. Students could create an original text of some sort that includes words, word elements, or semantically-related words from the previous week's activity. The text could be a letter, recipe, cartoon strip, song, short story, essay, set of instructions or other piece of writing; or students could even produce a short play that includes evidence of vocabulary growth. As an alternative students could draw diagrams of the sort produced in science, clothing design or architectural drawing classes with the vocabulary words included in labels for parts or processes.         For some types of texts teachers would need to be open to the idea that students could collaborate on their evaluations, an idea that we wholly endorse. For written texts we must caution that students often contrive meaningless strings of words simply to fulfill the requirements of the assessments, producing sentences such as "The ichthyophagous man had an inexsuperable case of osphresiophilia on his quindecennial wedding anniversary and intempestively squabbashed the pinguedinous phobophobe with a remugient recumbentibus." Teachers might want to set up some structures and guidelines so that students use the evaluation as a means of demonstrating vocabulary growth. For instance, you could offer students a series of possible themes and topics appropriate to the words studied for that week's vocabulary lesson. Students could then produce some sort of text that employs words related to those in the lesson, using the given themes and topics as a framework for their writing.
            Words from media. Students can list words that they come across on the radio, on television, in movies, in magazines, in popular music and so on that relate to the lessons from their vocabulary activities. They should identify the context of the word's appearance and provide a definition for the word relative to the context in which they have encountered it. Once again, the "definition" could possibly be an illustration, a picture cut out from a magazine, a pipe cleaner sculpture, or other representation of meaning other than a written phrase.
            Synonyms. Students can use a thesaurus to come up with synonyms for words encountered in the activities. Though synonyms can often provide adequate definitions, they can also lead to the belief that one word can easily substitute for another. One possible way of having students learn from looking up synonyms, then, is to have them distinguish among the meanings suggested by different synonyms in different contexts. J.I. Rodale's The Synonym Finder, for instance, provides forty synonyms for "obsequious." Students might provide examples for different occasions when certain synonyms are appropriate. Under what circumstances is a person "mealy-mouthed"? "docile"? "boot-licking"? "cowering"? and so on. Students could write brief character sketches of people exemplifying each of the synonyms, perhaps incorporating them into a narrative.
            As an alternative, students could illustrate the different meanings by acting them out. To define "obsequious," for instance, four students could play subservient members of a board of directors and one could play an autocratic chair, and they could act out the meaning of each of the previously-listed synonyms in a brief skit for the class, perhaps introducing the term "autocrat" as an antonym. You could also encourage students to produce other types of images to "define" the synonyms, including drawings, collages, sound effects, multi-media presentations and so on. Research on memory and cognition has found that when people can produce an image to aid their memory their recollection of information is enhanced (Neisser, 1967). This finding was supported in a pilot study on a vocabulary program in which students scored significantly higher on vocabulary assessments when they watched classmates perform brief skits that illustrated vocabulary words than they did when simply looking up definitions in the dictionary (Smagorinsky, 1985).
            This phenomenon is well illustrated by an example from popular culture. In one episode of the TV program Dear John, the main character, an English teacher, explains to a student that he remembers people's names by thinking of an image that he can associate with the name. To remember the name of a Japanese man in the building where he works, he explains, he envisions a man carrying a car engine into a pawn shop. The student thinks for a moment, and then says, "Ah! You mean Mr. Hokamota!" We do not know whether the program's script writers had any knowledge of cognitive psychology, but they did convey an important psychological principle through this amusing episode, one that our students can benefit from.
            Word stories. Grubaugh (1985) has suggested that students can produce stories built around vocabulary words. Students could develop a story built around a word based on a root, affix or semantic network stressed in that week's vocabulary lesson. Grubaugh gives the example of a student developing a story around "deluge" in which a girl is baby sitting a four year old boy who locks himself in the bathroom and tries to flush a doll down the toilet, creating a deluge. Students can share their stories with their classmates, and in follow-up discussions other students could tell their own stories about deluges. Students could use the opportunity to generate synonyms for the vocabulary word and discuss when they are interchangeable and when one is more appropriate than another. The activity itself could serve as an assessment; teachers could follow it up with a conventional test that includes all words presented in stories or discussed as synonyms; or teachers could issue a further assessment of a different type from the series that we are suggesting.
            Assessments modeled on standardized tests. Some teachers use vocabulary assessments as a way to prepare students for the sorts of problems found on standardized tests. Teachers can prepare analogy problems, multiple choice problems, and paragraphs in which students determine meaning from context, using the words from the previous week's vocabulary activity. Examples of such problems are widely available in publications that prepare students for the SAT and other tests. As an alternative, you could have students devise the problems. In doing so they might better understand the logic behind the development of standardized test word problems.
            Notes on Appendixes
At the end of the book are three appendixes. Appendix A provides a list from which you can select exam words, or develop additional problems for the activities we present. The words are arranged alphabetically by word element, allowing you the flexibility to pick whichever words you wish for testing, depending on which words you've used in that week's activity. If, for instance, you have played "Strategy," and have used "lucubration," "palingenesis," "verisimilitude," and "substaquilate" among your activity words, you could go to the end and look under the word element headings for "loqu, luc" (speak), "gen" (birth), "ver" (true), and "sub" (under) and select "elocution," "genocide," "veracity," and "subterfuge" for some of that week's test words. We suggest that you do not tell the students the words' definitions, but require them instead to determine their meanings on their own, so that they must actively use the knowledge they have gained from the activities. We wish to stress again that testing vocabulary knowledge solely through definitions is highly problematic, and recommend that you use exams as only one of several means of evaluation.
Appendix B provides lists of prefixes, roots and suffixes which are not used in any of the activities in this book. Appendix B serves as a reference for teachers who want to make up their own exercises for the activities we outline, or want to make up their own activities using different word elements.
Appendix C provides a list of possible Bonus Words for use at the end of vocabulary exams, and for all-around fun with words.