As you may know, Nevada was awarded one of the highly competitive Reading First grants.  Reading First has two related but distinct focuses, the professional development of teachers and the reading proficiency of students.  The Reading First bottom line is that reading achievement will increase and the reading deficit will decrease.

To that end, Dr. Meggin McIntosh was invited to create vocabulary development workshops for educators throughout the state of Nevada.

The Reason for These Workshops

Here’s what Meggin says:

I am fascinated by literacy issues.  My educational background (I have a Ph.D. in Reading Education and Linguistics and an M.S. in Elementary Education and Linguistics) and the availability of the Nevada Reading First Grant allowed me to create and present workshops for educators throughout the Silver State.  The name of these workshops, Owning Words for Literacy™, is particularly relevant.  In every piece of literature that I have sent out, I use the following statement to clarify the importance of owning words for literacy:

Teachers who participate in the Owning Words for Literacy™ workshops will be learning ways to build students’ vocabulary—concurrently with their knowledge.  Vocabulary and knowledge are interdependent.  Without knowledge, students cannot learn the vocabulary that will help them be more literate and, without an adequate vocabulary, students cannot learn.  It’s a synchronous process and we will use that power in students’ favor.

These are the statistics that I kept in mind while developing the Owning Words for Literacy™ series:

• First-grade children from higher-SES groups know about twice as many words as lower SES children (Graves, Brunetti, & Slater, 1982; Graves & Slater, 1987).
• High school seniors near the top of their class know about four times as many words as their lower-performing classmates (Smith, 1941).
• High-knowledge third graders have vocabularies about equal to lowest-performing 12th graders (Smith, 1941).

Most chilling however, is the finding that once established, such differences appear difficult to ameliorate (Biemiller, 1999; Hart & Risley, 1995). From Beck, McKeown, & Kucan. (2002). Bringing Words to Life.

What’s Next?

Meggin has offered Owning Words for Literacy™ workshops for teachers from every county in Nevada (and this amounts to over 2000 educators in the three years since the workshops’ inception).  In June 2007, Meggin will be training a select group of educators to continue the work of presenting Owning Words for Literacy™ workshops throughout the Silver State.  Thanks to the Nevada Reading First grant and local districts, these trainers will continue to offer Owning Words for Literacy™ classes in every county.