This article first appeared in the teacher teacher March 2, 2018. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved.

Previously in The teacher teacher (31.7), I wrote about my efforts to help students get what John C. Bean in Engaging Ideas (2001) call it “the dictionary habit”. At the time of writing, I had always assumed that my approach to teaching the “dictionary habit” was effective. However, an email from a student asking for the meaning of the word “dwellings” alerted me to the possibility that my approach was perhaps too teacher-centric. In other words, I began to wonder if I had inspired this student to turn to me for a definition rather than a first-class dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary (WD). In short, until then, it was me who chose the words we were looking for when reading the texts, at least in most cases. After the student email, I decided to try something new, something more organic. As a self-proclaimed “dictionary buff,” what happened fascinated me.

I have created a “dictionary exercise” for both sections of each of the two courses I teach (four sections in all). For one lesson, students had to look up two words while reading the book River out of Eden by Richard Dawkins. Students could choose words they did not know or words whose particular usage was unfamiliar to them. After choosing their words, they had to write down the Dawkins sentences in which each word appears, and they had to cite the correct definition for each word as provided in the WD. For the other lesson, the students did exactly the same thing, but they had to choose their words from stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe.

I selected the results of the exercises of 23 students from a section where the students worked from the text of Dawkins. The students had searched for two words each for a total of 46 words. Surprisingly, there were 42 different words in all! The words included “balances”, “gunwales”, “piece”, “parsimonious” and “frai”. Only four words were repeated on the assignments of different students, and each of these only once: “erroneously”, “insurmountable”, “pernicious” and “progenitor”. I hadn’t anticipated the extreme variety of words, which taught me a lesson about the diversity of students’ reading experiences.

In a section of the course where students worked from the Poe texts, there were also substantial variations, but not quite as much. Yet these results offered me their own special lesson. In this sample, 26 students searched for two words each for a total of 52 responses. Among those 52 responses were 33 different words, including “hogshead”, “intemperance”, “pale”, “fantasy” and “respite”. In addition, nine words were repeated, four of them more than once: “obedience”, “sagacity”, “sepulcher” and “seraph”. The word “sepulchre” was repeated seven times, the most by far. Interestingly, the word “sepulchre” has become part of my personal lexicon, probably since my years of reading Poe. Consequently, and wrongly, it is very likely not a word that I would have chosen to research with my classes! Undoubtedly, teachers make assumptions about the material they teach and how students will receive it, as I did about the word “sepulchre.” It’s hard to see how it wouldn’t. Nevertheless, my experience in this case reminded me that I must continually question my own assumptions.

Indeed, although it seems like it should be obvious, especially in hindsight, a semester of these exercises has made me more fully aware that individual students’ critical reading experiences present discrete challenges. I cannot assume that students’ encounters with texts generally mirror those of other students or my own. As I noted in the previous article regarding Mary Wollstonecraft’s use of the verb “sophisticated” in A demand for women’s rights, there are times when the class as a whole can effectively and meaningfully focus on a single word-related reading lesson. I don’t intend to miss such moments. However, I recognized that a more organic approach to encouraging students to use the dictionary adds a critical dimension that likely benefits students in ways that teacher-centered moments simply cannot.

Post views:
104