Rebecca Silverman

EDUC 359
Professor Reilly
Vocabulary Lesson Reflection
When conducting this lesson, my students had almost no knowledge of the words I taught.
Truthfully, I had never really seen any of those words used before. I was able to identify the roots
of some words and recognize them because of my prior knowledge of Latin, but I was unable to
make meaning of the words through recognition alone.
The four vocabulary words that I taught to my students were: uxoricide and sparge. Being
that these words are not used in common everyday language, it was quite hard for them to try to
define them. The objectives I had for the lesson was: 1) The students will be able to define the
four vocabulary words; 2) The students will be able to relate them to real-life experiences. I
made these two learning objectives because my students were three well-educated college
students that I thought might recognize this vocabulary from preparing for the SAT exam. I
introduced the words to the students with no clues or introduction given. I asked each student to
try and pronounce the words uxoricide and sparge,. The students were able to pronounce sparge
correctly, but not uxoricide. Once I had familiarized myself with the definition of each word, I
made a PowerPoint with picture clues on each slide to represent each word. Prior to making the
PowerPoint, the students were unable to put meaning to all the words. With the assistance of the
PowerPoint, the students were able to make more of an educated guess as to what each of the
two words meant. No verbal assistance was provided until after the student had stated their
definition.

Unfortunately, I was not able to achieve either of the two objectives. Being that the words are
fairly old and no longer used it in modern day English, the students had a hard time pronouncing
the words at first exposure. For the future, especially teaching vocabulary to an ELL student, this
type of lesson needs to be taken a lot more seriously. I learned from this experience that repeated
exposure to a word is extremely important for success and true understanding of that word.
Taking your time with a student, speaking clearly, and providing visual aids or examples to a
student truly helps them succeed in their learning. These skills can be applied to any subject.