How to Teach Vocabulary: Strategies to Support Word Learning and Build Knowledge

September 9, 2025

Have you ever searched for the perfect word to describe a situation or a feeling? Have you struggled to convey your precise thinking without that perfect word? Students, who don’t expand their word knowledge, not only can’t express themselves accurately, they also can’t fully understand and learn from their reading. A good vocabulary improves comprehension of complex texts, boosts confidence, and supports academic success.

Most words are learned in context—through reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Students acquire vocabulary as they talk with others, explore interests, try hobbies, watch videos, and delve into new content. When students are armed with reading strategies that provide them with multiple ways to figure out new words they encounter on their own in texts, they will have an essential toolkit that allows them to tackle texts with confidence and deepen their knowledge.

What Does the Research Say?

Reading comprehension has been empirically linked to a reader’s ability to understand the words in a text—the better a reader’s vocabulary, the more likely they are to derive meaning from even the most complex texts.[1] In fact, vocabulary is one of the five core components of reading instruction essential to successfully teaching children to read.[2]Furthermore, the reciprocal relationship between vocabulary development and knowledge building leads is essential to comprehension.[3] Vocabulary instruction should be a part of lessons across the entire day, as I wrote about last year, here. One way to include vocabulary instruction is to teach explicit reading strategies for comprehending vocabulary.

Do My Students Need Reading Strategies for Comprehending Vocabulary?

There are several ways you can determine if your students could benefit from explicit instruction related to comprehending vocabulary. A standardized word knowledge assessment can help you identify if your students meet grade-level standards in their overall word knowledge. If not, a combination of reading strategy instruction and vocabulary lessons is called for. While reading aloud to students, you might prompt them to define a word they don’t know, one whose meaning can be figured out by text features, sentence structure, or other textual clues. Notice if students have ways to figure out these words from other information within the text. A morphology assessment will help you evaluate a student’s understanding of morphemes—meaning-based units of language such as affixes, and roots—and how they combine to form words. There are many strategies you can teach to help learn and utilize that knowledge to determine the meanings of unknown words, and the results of the assessment might also point to the need for more structured vocabulary lessons as described in this book.

How Do I Know Which Strategies to Teach?

The best way to determine which strategies will best resonate with your students is to use a skill progression to guide your selection. For instance, if your students need help skip over unfamiliar words, you’ll want to use strategies at the beginning of the skill progression. Whereas, if your students can use context and prior knowledge to infer word meaning, they are ready to explore strategies that help them analyze word parts and sentence structure and apply knowledge of grammar, morphology, and/or etymology.

Let’s look at a couple of strategies, one at the beginning and one near the end of the skill progression.

Beginning Strategy: Insert a Synonym

Skill Progression:  Ready to infer word meaning from prior knowledge.

Skills: Activating Prior Knowledge | Inferring | Self-Monitoring

Insert a word or phrase that would fit the meaning and structure of the sentence and makes sense with the overall context. Knowledge of the familiar word leads to learning a new word.

Prompts:

·       What word might make sense here?

·       Is there another word that could fit here?

·       Now that you have found a synonym, how does that word connect to the word the author used?

Advanced Strategy: Read Up a Ladder

Skill Progression:  Using several strategies independently and is ready to use outside sources.

Skills: Building Knowledge | Synthesizing

Collect several books (or podcasts and videos) on the same topic. Read the easiest, collecting words and definitions important to the topic. Progress to the next book in the ladder, adding to your collection of words. Continue until you can read the most challenging book selected.

 Prompts:

·       What texts can you find on the same topic?

·       What words did you learn from the first text that might help you with the words in next?

Strategies provide students with a doable step-by-step process that allows them to actively use multiple strategies to figure out the meaning of new or unknown words. With use, the strategies become automatic, and students apply them with ease, allowing them to infer, synthesize, analyze, and build knowledge as they encounter new words or phrases.  

For more strategies to help students build their vocabulary, check out The Reading Strategies Book 2.0. These strategies will help students not only in school but throughout their life, allowing them to not only read complex text, but also to express themselves with clarity, nuance, and precision. 

For your own set of reproducible student cards designed to help students be independent with each strategy you teach, see here.

[1] Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2013; Logan & Kieffer, 2017; Mancilla-Martinex & McClain, 2020; Stanovich, 1986; Watts-Taffe, Fisher, & Blachowicz, 2017.

[2] National Reading Panel, 2000.

[3] Cervetti, Wright, & Hwand, 2016; Wright et al., 2022.

References

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2013). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Logan, J.K., & Kieffer, M.J. (2017). Academic vocabulary instruction: Building knowledge about the word and how words work. In D. Lapp & D. Fisher (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (4th ed., pp. 162–182). Routledge.

Mancilla-Martinez, J., & McClain, J. B. (2020). What do we know today about the complexity of vocabulary gaps and what do we not know? In Handbook of Reading Research (Vol. 5, pp. 216–236). Routledge.

Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 22, 360–407.

Watts-Taffe, S., Fisher, P., & Blachowicz, C. (2017). Vocabulary instruction: Research and practice. In D. Fisher & D. Lapp (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (4th ed.). Routledge.

National Reading Panel (US), National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (US). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for

reading instruction: Reports of the subgroups. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health.

Cervetti, G. N., Wright, T. S., & Hwang, H. (2016). Conceptual coherence, comprehension, and vocabulary acquisition: A knowledge effect? Reading and Writing, 29 (4), 761–779.

Wright, T. S., Cervetti, G. N., Wise, C., & McClung, N. A. (2022). The impact of knowledge-building through conceptually coherent read alouds on vocabulary and comprehension. Reading Psychology, 4 (1), 70–84.