Understanding the Complexity of Choosing Tier Two Vocabulary

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It is important to have an understanding of the tiers of vocabulary. Recently I was working with a group of Providence College graduate students as we created a reading lesson plan using the story ‘Caps for Sale’ for students with autism spectrum disorder. As part of my work with the students, we talked about the importance of vocabulary. All vocabulary is not created alike and there is a need to understand the tiers of vocabulary to ensure we are teaching tier two vocabulary It is important to understand the complexities of choosing tier two vocabulary.

What are the tiers of vocabulary?

Simply put:

Tier One Vocabulary: everyday words, conversational words typically are not multiple meaning words these words usually don’t need to be taught example of words: apple, mom, car.
Tier Two Vocabulary: high-frequency words found across a variety of contexts often found in literature, these words are important for reading comprehension, many of them have multiple meanings, they may be more descriptive words these words should be directly taught examples of words: peddler, bicker, amusing.
Tier Three Vocabulary: context-specific words, low-frequency words, often connected with specific curriculum subjects these are usually taught when needed such as when studying a particular unit in class. examples of words atoms, photosynthesis, herbivores.

In reviewing the graduate student’s lessons plans I was encouraged by their acknowledging the importance of teaching vocabulary however there was confusion about the tiers. Although it was easy to remedy the difference in the tiers, one interesting fact was that not only do you need to consider the tiers but also the culture, age, and experiences of our audience.

Many of the graduate students had the word ‘cap’ as a tier two vocabulary word. Their rationale was that the students might confuse the word ‘cap’ with the top of a bottle. Before I dismissed their logic I needed to think of their experience. The class was all female students in their twenties. They may be more likely to use the word ‘cap’ to talk about bottles, whereas usually when I am teaching this story to children they think about ‘baseball caps’ which mirrors more what the story is about in that it is a peddler selling hats. So it is not necessarily wrong for the graduate students to decide to teach the word ‘caps’ to insure this multiple-meaning word is understood.

This did remind me to really consider not just the vocabulary words in the context of the literature but to also consider the audience I was presenting it to when selecting words that I will be teaching. An example of this from another book was the word ‘laundromat’. I grew up in New York City and a trip to the laundromat was a very common experience and in fact my Saturday chore. However, I was working with some students in rural Rhode Island in which it is more common for every house to have a washer and dryer, and the ‘laundromat’ is a pretty rare sight. When I was traveling in Ireland the washers and dryers were outside in the gasoline stations. So although the word laundromat might be a tier-one word in New York City, it would need to be taught in other situations especially as having an understanding of the word ‘laundromat’ which was the setting of the story would be important for the comprehension of a story.

In summary, the teaching of vocabulary is very important for oral and written language. There are tiers of vocabulary and we need to ensure that we are teaching more than the basic vocabulary to our students. However there is not really a definitive list of tier two vocabulary rather we need to examine words that are multiple meanings, and words that might not be understood because of the experiences of our students.