Vocabulary: Difference Between Purposeful And Strategic Conversations

As an educator, it is important to teach children the tools needed to be successful in school, the community, and the future. Specifically, an elementary school teacher must focus on teaching vocabulary since it is one of the building blocks of learning to read, write, and speak. Barbara Wasik and Charlene Iannone-Campbell published an article, Developing Vocabulary Through Purposeful, Strategic Conversations, and the article is intended to provide the audience with research to support the importance of vocabulary development, a description of the difference between “conversations versus purposeful, strategic conversations” (Wasik and Iannone-Campbell 322), and ways for teachers to use strategies for purposeful conversations in the classroom. Wasik and Iannone-Campbell used …show more content…
Believe it or not there is a difference between having a casual conversation and a conversation that uses new vocabulary and strengthens students’ skills in reading and writing. A conversation can be surface level content, which means that students do not reach too far into their prior knowledge and does not challenge them. Purposeful and strategic conversations do have a purpose and an outcome. The authors draw the audience in to this section of the article by using ethos, because a person can tell when a conversation is deep and meaningful. In this section the authors provide some examples of ways to use conversations to challenge students. One example that was provided was to use open ended questions. Instead of receiving yes or no answers, students are expected to provide detailed responses, which will extend into a more developed conversation. The authors took a simple task and was able to show that creating conversations is not very difficult, if a teacher or parent has the right techniques to