Dancing with Words: Helping Students Love Language through Authentic Vocabulary Instruction

by Judith Rowe Michaels, Richard Lederer (Foreword)

This book invites teachers and students to taste and hear and move to the music of words, words in isolation and in interesting juxtapositions, and urges them to bring their own life experience to language, showing in turn how language can help them know that experience more fully. Michaels demonstrates how to build a community in the classroom in which students and teacher not only take time to test out shades of connotation and learn about how words and syntax create voice, but they also risk engaging in personal and philosophical discussions that grow from seemingly simple words such as solitude, self, and phony. The book offers a chapter on how to appreciate the different vocabularies used in a big city newspaper―in sports writing, book and TV reviews, news reporting, editorials, and science writing. Dancing with Words uses practical and fun activities with words to invite students to a lifelong dance with language.

Genres: Teaching

135 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unique lessons for high school level.

[Kay Mcgriff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Judith Rowe Michaels captures what language study can be in her book Dancing with Words (NCTE 2001). Rather than handing out stale lists of vocabulary words, she explores the dynamic, ever-changing uses of language with her students. It is both playful and profound. I am taking away so many ideas for my own classroom and my own reading and writing. Here are just a few.

Keep word lists from your reading. After a free-reading period, students jot down words in a notebook. Periodically, students read a paragraph or sentence from their reading aloud. From these lists and sharing, come rich book recommendations as well as discussions of vocabulary and craft.
It is important to hear what words sound like in the ear and feel like in the mouth. Sometimes words should be acted out in order to fully explore the range of meanings possible.
Words and language should be shared through word murals, free-writes, discussions, and pantomimes. A single word can lead to varied free-writes on anything from associations to memories. What other words are related? How does the history of the word shade its current meanings?
One word can lead to another and another and another. Brainstorm synonyms and related words. Brainstorm categories of words. How and why does one word feel different from another? How does the word you choose change the meaning of what you say?
Be inventive with language--like Shakespeare. Did you know he made up 8.5 percent of the written words he used? How can we use old words in a new context or combine words in a surprising way? Those word lists can help with this sort of drafting and revising.
Exploring a key word (self, community, jealously) through writing can help students enter a difficult work of literature and grapple with the ideas and themes.
I love this quote from the book (just one of many I underlined): "It's interesting that so many books on writing ask us to consciously 'search' for 'the best words' in order to describe something rather than describe something in order to find the best words" (117). I want to give my students the opportunity to explore with words and discover their own voices.