Concept+Circle

=**Concept Circles...** = Concept Circles (Vacca, Vacca & Gove, 1987) are used to categorize words and justify connections between words. It is a visual organizer that prompts students to articulate how words are related, either orally or in writing.

=**According to Janet Allen...** = Allen offers good suggestions about using Concept Circles in thinking conceptually about vocabulary (Allen, pg. 14). The activities she suggests are about making connections, including or excluding words based on relationships between words, and writing about the words. These activities foster deep thinking about words, a key ingredient to effective word learning (Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986). Stahl and Nagy (2006) also advocate the teaching of concepts, especially for more abstract or complex words, such as “liberty” or “prehistoric”. At the surface level, this strategy seems to be useful for working with academic vocabulary and concepts in the content areas.

=**According to Natasha...** = However, there is a mismatch between these clear suggestions for use and the examples that are provided as samples. The first example is taken from a sixth grade classroom studying the “Westward Movement” (Allen, pg. 15). The words used in the two concept circles are: //boosters, trail, wagon, hardships, hunting, food, diseases// and //learning//. While //boosters// and //hardship// are the two words that might be the most inaccessible to a sixth grader, words such as hunting, wagon, food, learning and disease are more common words. Without giving criteria for selecting academic vocabulary, this example makes it seem as if any words from a content paragraph can be considered “academic”. In this particular case, it may be useful to draw from Coxhead’s Academic wordlist (2000) or Beck, McKeown and Kucan’s (2002) tier II and III word categories to ensure that at least two of the words in each circle are truly academic words, if this is the purpose of the activity.

The fact that there is a mismatch between the nature of the words selected and the purpose of the concept circles is a key issue. In the “When and Why Would I Use This Strategy” section, Allen reveals that she mostly uses Concept Circles as an assessment tool. The three examples provided are all post-reading assessment examples. The irony here is that Concept Circles are intended to be a tool for //teaching// academic vocabulary, yet they are not being used to teach, but to assess. Illustrating this is another Concept Circle example from a 9th grade class completing a unit on Romeo and Juliet (Allen, pg. 16). The words in the circle are: //Romeo, Mercutio, party// and //love//. The objective of the example is to assess their knowledge by having the students write about how these words are related. While one can see how the concept circles used in this example can serve as a character and plot review, they neither include nor assesses academic vocabulary.

One major shortcoming of the previous examples provided by Allen is that key concepts and key academic terms are not clearly defined or selected. Nagy (1988) cautions against teaching new words merely as labels, never fully exploiting the conceptual importance and potential of the word. Making a small change to the Romeo and Juliet concept circle by substituting love for “infatuation”, would anchor the other words to a concept that is ripe for exploration and firmly anchored in possible interpretations from the text. Infatuation is related to love conceptually, but has different connotations, and might be considered a Tier II type word (Beck et al., 2002). This modification shows that the idea of concept circles can work towards teaching academic vocabulary if the words are carefully and thoughtfully chosen, and are in fact, academic in nature.

I have to conclude by giving Allen credit for getting one example right. The last Concept Circle offered as a sample for a History class includes the words //immigrants, emigrate, Abraham Lincoln// and //“created equal”// (Allen, pg. 17). In this circle, //emigrate// and //immigrate// are specific content area words that can be considered more academic, or Tier II-III in nature. Also, because two of the words, immigrant and emigrate are semantically similar, these can be potentially confusing to students, yet they are key concepts in understanding key eras and foundations of American history. Therefore using this combination of words is productive for using and assessing academic vocabulary.

__**References: **__ Beck, I., McKeown, M., & Kucan, L. (2002). //Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary// //instruction.// New York: Guilford. Coxhead, A. (2000) A new academic word list. //TESOL Quarterly// //34//, 2, 213-238. Nagy, W.E. (1988). //Teaching vocabulary to improve reading comprehension//. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Stahl, S. A., & Fairbanks, M. M. (1986). The effects of vocabulary instruction: A model-based meta-analysis. //Review of Educational Research,// //56//(1), 72-110. Stahl, S. A., & Nagy, W. E. (2006). //Teaching word meanings//. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Vacca, J.L., Vacca, R. T., & Grove, M. K. (1987). //Reading and learning to read//. Boston: Little, Brown. <span style="color: #c0c0c0; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif; font-size: 120%; text-align: left;">(Wiki design by: Michella Maiorana-Basas)