Vocabulary and Comprehension
What this domain tests
Vocabulary breadth and depth, explicit word instruction, and the comprehension strategies plus knowledge base that produce meaning. Items ask you to classify a word by tier, choose an instructional routine, or match a strategy to a comprehension demand.
Vocabulary
- Tiers (Beck, McKeown & Kucan): Tier 1 everyday words; Tier 2 high-frequency, cross-domain academic words mature readers know (reluctant, coincidence, contrast); Tier 3 domain-specific terms (photosynthesis, archipelago). Tier 2 is the priority for direct instruction.
- Robust instruction: student-friendly definitions, multiple contexts and non-examples, semantic maps, word sorts, morphological analysis, and many meaningful encounters. Wide reading builds breadth; explicit teaching builds depth.
- Receptive vocabulary exceeds expressive; assess both.
Comprehension
Comprehension draws on the upper strands of Scarborough's rope: background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax, verbal reasoning, and genre knowledge. Strategies to teach explicitly: activating and building prior knowledge, predicting, questioning, monitoring and clarifying, visualizing, summarizing, and using text structure.
- QAR: Right There (literal, one sentence), Think and Search (across the text), Author and You (inference from text plus schema), On My Own (schema only).
- Reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown): predict, question, clarify, summarize, with students rotating the leader role.
- Gradual release (Pearson & Gallagher): modeled, shared, guided, independent.
Worked example
A class reads about a drought. The teacher asks, "Why did the author say the reservoir 'sank' rather than 'shrank'?" Reasoning: the answer requires inference about figurative language and effect - an Author and You question, not Right There - so the teacher models thinking aloud, then pairs annotate the word and defend interpretations with text evidence.
Traps
Equating Tier 2 with "difficult words"; pre-teaching every word so students never learn word-learning strategies; asking text-independent questions; treating strategies as the goal rather than a route to building knowledge.