If, over a school year, a fifth-grade student reads for an hour each day, five days a week (in and out of school), at a conservative rate of 150 words per minute, the student will encounter 2,250,000 words in the course of reading.Consider the following argument for the effects of wide reading: 2 Second, there is a growing body of research showing that, although the odds of learning any particular word from context are small, the cumulative effects of learning from reading can be large. First, there is the evidence of those avid readers who acquire large vocabularies largely apart from any type of explicit instruction in vocabulary. Can wide reading really be enough to help students learn so many words? Evidence indicates that it can. Remember, to keep up, students need to learn at a rate of 2,000-3,000 words per year to catch up, they need to exceed this rate.

In short, the single most important thing you can do to improve students' vocabularies is to get them to read more. Increasing the opportunities for such encounters improves students' vocabulary knowledge, which, in turn, improves their ability to read more and more complex text. 1 Students learn new words by encountering them in text, either through their own reading or by being read to. We know that the volume of students' reading is strongly related to their vocabulary knowledge. What to do about the size of the task Wide Reading

Iword usage instrustions