The Coming Vocabulary Crisis

 

The Coming Vocabulary Crisis and How to Fix It

"'Odors,' 'pregnant,' and 'vouchsafed.' I'll get 'em all three all ready."

                Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Last year, a colleague of mine attended a workshop for children from Detroit. The organizers were talking about managing expectations, and one of them said, "So you make plans, and you don't know if they'll always turn out, but you hope." One little girl immediately raised her hand. When she was called on she asked, "What is ‘hope'”? Aside from revealing in a profoundly heartbreaking way what it is like to grow up without privilege and without opportunity, her question also speaks to something profound. We feel instinctively that to lack a word might also be to lack the thing it signifies. Words are the foundation for inward thinking and external expression. We encounter this phenomenon in our students every day, although it rarely moves us as deeply. Our students' vocabularies inform both who they are and who they can be. Unfortunately, their knowledge of words is currently in danger. It is an issue that cuts across all of the college-age demographics, and we need to think about how to respond in our teaching.

There is good reason to be concerned. Many studies in recent years have suggested that our students are reading less, hearing less conversation, and bringing a smaller vocabulary to college.(1) Our incoming students may well be on the brink of a steeper vocabulary decline. There are two reasons to think so. First, vocabulary size has always strongly correlated with economic privilege.(2) As we recruit increasing numbers of students from less privileged backgrounds, our student bodies will surely need more vocabulary help. Second, cognitive studies have suggested that language learning works better for most people when it includes auditory cues. As we admit students who grew up with smartphones and tablets (our current generation of students didn't encounter them until around age 9), some researchers have posited that they "will end up with a lower average number of words than previous generations."(3)  This change would show up first in our more economically privileged students. They may be just as communicative (though not in person), but they will be more comfortable with gifs, memes, and emojis than with sentences. Some of you may have already seen signs of such a change, but on the whole the most challenging thing about assessing vocabulary is that our students can be losing ground without our noticing. We may see this occasionally, as when it becomes suddenly clear that half of a class doesn't know a word that you consider common. But more often, vocabulary deficits are like fungi, which grow largely below ground, out of sight.

Teaching students who know fewer words is challenging, but we are perhaps too used to thinking of the issue as merely an obstacle to the delivery of content or a barrier to reading comprehension. In fact, a reduced vocabulary can create larger problems. It can sap students' overall confidence, make them less able to have a conversation (let alone a discussion), less able to get a joke, and less likely to form friendships or sustain a relationship. On a larger scale, a society with an impoverished language is less likely to have civil conversations. And since language underlies much of our ability to think and imagine, a people who cannot say as much are less likely to think of or imagine the solutions to complex problems. As professors of the liberal arts, we have a particular obligation to face problems that go beyond our classroom.

As we face this challenge, it is tempting to think that our jobs are simply to supply the lack by making vocabulary a part of our content, as most of us already do for the technical vocabulary of our fields. But the problem goes beyond the fact that students have lost ground that they may or may not be able to recover.  Rather, students’ fundamental attitudes towards language and word- learning are themselves shifting. When they encounter words at a young age as part of a primarily visual medium not centered on words themselves (not like a book, for instance), they are less likely approach them as things to be adopted and reused. New words cease to be tools for students to adopt and reuse; instead they become items thrown at them, items they are (often falsely) sure they can look up as needed. Even if they are asked to memorize a definition, the word itself remains a kind of alien artifact. The ubiquity of the Internet does not help. Recent research suggests that the availability of search options falsely inflates people's intellectual confidence in ways that persist even if the Internet is not available.(4) If this evidence holds true, we may find students less likely to look up words on their own and less likely to think of an unknown word as a gap or deficit that needs to be made up. When they do look up words, they won't be as sensitive to multiple meanings.  

I suspect that most of us already have an array of techniques we use for promoting vocabulary learning, but most of us generally direct these techniques at the field-specific terminology that our students have always needed to learn. Some time ago, Beck and McKeown argued that adults have distinct levels or "tiers" of vocabulary. (5) Tier 1 words are the simple, unambiguous words learned in childhood, mostly unconsciously. Tier 2 words are more complex, context specific words that we learn consciously (and with assistance) as we grow up. Tier 3 words are rare domain-specific words, like the terminology in our academic fields. Our vocabulary teaching has been largely dedicated to tier 3; we presume that students are learning new tier 2 words on their own. Of course, our present techniques for teaching our tier 3 words may also have to be updated in light of our students’ varied linguistic experiences. We will probably need to spend time rewarding students for adopting and using this vocabulary rather than just asking them to learn definitions. 

Dealing with tier 2 deficits, however, is something all of us will need to be far more self-conscious about. At the very least, we will need to resist the constant pressure to simplify our language; instead, we need to use a rich vocabulary in ways that provide students with the context in which to learn words as well as concepts.  But we also need to build in our students the habit of approaching words as opportunities. We need to encourage them to play with new words, to make jokes using double meanings, to think about new words, and to use new words. No matter what field we are in, we need to model for them an excitement in words and language and allow them to experience the power that comes from fitting a new word to a new situation.

1.  Tom Nicholson and Sue Dymock, Teaching Reading Vocabulary (NZCER Press, 2017). “To Read or Not To Read A Question of National Consequence” (National Endowment for the Arts, 2007).

2. Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (P.H. Brookes, 1995).

3.  Marco Catani Qtd. in Fiona Macrae Science Correspondent, “iPad Generation ‘Will Learn Fewer Words’ as Oral Tradition of Passing on Knowledge Is Dying out,” Mail Online, July 23, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2374391/iPad-generation-learn-fewer-words-oral-tradition-passing-knowledge-dying-out.html. The full impact of smartphones and tablets on the upcoming generation is still not entirely clear. After all, books are a visual rather than auditory medium, and we know that reading improves vocabulary. Much may depend on how children are generally interacting with mobile devices.

4.  Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, and Frank C. Keil, “Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge.,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144, no. 3 (2015): 674.

5.  Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Linda Kucan, Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (Tandem Library, 2002).