Will Publishers Heed our Pleas? What’s REALLY at Stake in the Upcoming Textbook Adoption

(Originally published in May 2004).
As we enter the early stages of this year’s textbook adoption cycle this fall, never before have the “textbook stakes” for social studies been so great.   More will rest upon the deliberations of district and statewide textbook committees than just the determination of which books’ content will best suit our state and district needs.   This year’s adoption may help determine whether we will continue to provide an equitable social studies foundation for all children.   

Never before has reading and accountability driven the K-12 curriculum as much as it does today.   Over the last several years we’ve seen the evaporation of time and emphasis in the teaching of social studies.  As a result, some contend that the emphasis on student individual reading performance requires textbook publishers eliminate what amounts to a gaping hole in our social studies textbooks – their virtual silence on “non-subject specific” vocabulary.   How well they deal with this may end up determining whether some students in the near future are even enrolled in true social studies courses or given actual social studies textbooks.   

What is meant by “non-subject specific” vocabulary?  It fundamentally differs from the list of subject specific vocabulary words that are generally introduced to students at the beginning of each chapter.  These words are typed in boldface and are always listed in the glossary.  Textbook publishers have been doing a better job in recent years dealing with such vocabulary.  Where they fall short, however, is providing vocabulary support for those ordinary English words that do NOT pertain to the subject being studied - words like “opulent”, “virulent” or “sagacious”.    Publishers of social studies texts often remain totally silent on the treatment of these words.   It is a weakness we can no longer afford.

Just how important is vocabulary development?   Despite countless developmental reading studies and billions of dollars invested in reading research, it’s hard to find a definitive answer.  In  The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 4  researchers showed the “average child in the professional families [is provided] with [a weekly exposure to] 215,000 words of language experience, the average child in a working-class family provided with 125,000 words, and the average child in a welfare family with 62,000 words of language experience.  In a 5,200-hour year, the amount would be 11.2 million words for a child in a professional family, 6.5 million words for a child in a working-class family, and 3.2 million words for a child in a welfare family.” 1   The authors continue to carry out the equation to the inevitable 30 million word gap by age four.   

Jean Chall, however, disputes the critical need for vocabulary development up to age four.  Her research cites it is after children enter school that the real problem becomes evident.  In Poor Children’s  Fourth Grade Slump, Chall states, “One possible reason for the fourth-grade slump may stem from lack of fluency and automaticity (that is, quick and accurate recognition of words and phrases).  Why should low-income children have greater difficulty with word meanings at about the fourth grade?  One reason is that the words at fourth grade and above are less familiar to them.  Although the children’s language seemed to have been sufficient for the first three grades, theywere not prepared to meet the challenge of the greater number of abstract, technical, and literary words characteristic of the reading materials of grades 4 and beyond.”    Her study found  “students used context well to compensate for their weakness in word meanings.  But when there were too many difficult words, their comprehension declined as well (emphasis added).”  She concludes, “The high correlation of word knowledge with reading comprehension has been found consistently in the research literature from the turn of the century to the present time. . . . ” 2  

My own intuition tells me there’s probable truth in both versions.  The important point is that vocabulary understanding may account for 90% or more of the comprehension a student derives from a reading selection.  Research shows that a student who doesn’t understand one or two words in a couple of sentences can, by applying contextual clues, infer the general meaning of a passage.3   Some argue, however, that reading comprehension falls off exponentially with increases in vocabulary errors.  Multiply the words not understood and comprehension will be reduced by more than the factor of words being misunderstood.   I wish Chall had directed her research to provide a more definitive understanding of this issue.  Regardless, common sense would seem to indicate the vocabulary gap profoundly widens after children enter school.  Our schools are no longer comprised of students who are predominantly from the middle class.  In many cases, the majority are not even from native English speaking families.  Moreover, there has been an equally profound proliferation of cable television and other entertainment that are more geared to ‘cultural language differences’ than the established ‘middle class’ language patterns of the three major networks of thirty years ago.  Thus, the many hours students spend watching television or listening to the radio no longer assures their exposure to a common, middle class culture and vocabulary.  This means that problems associated with language will exacerbate in today’s culture, not lessen.   In summary, vocabulary understanding is extremely important to reading comprehension, societal changes have made teachers’ efforts to instill vocabulary understanding more difficult, the picture worsens as children enter the upper elementary grades, and things will very likely continue to worsen.  What is surprising is that publishers have not sufficiently addressed this problem in their social studies textbooks.

I first began to discuss this issue with publishers several years ago.  While working with social studies teachers at a couple of schools with heavy ESOL populations, I found our teachers had to individually prepare a wide variety of vocabulary activities for students.  Teachers had to take time to do several things that we felt publishers should have done for us.   For example, one simple tactic was to distribute yellow highlighters to each student so that as they read their books common words could be identified for later practice and assessment.  We also had students complete a variety of graphic organizers specifically designed to assist with their understanding of vocabulary.  Sometimes students were asked to list the words that they were unfamiliar with and attempt a definition using contextual clues.  At other times, the words were identified by the teacher and the class had to categorize them as words they ‘clearly understood’, ‘thought they understood’ or ‘still needed help in understanding’.   Such activities helped our teachers gain a reference for stressing only those words that were most confusing to the class.  Teachers incorporated strategies such as Dinah Zike’s “Foldables strategies” and specifically targeted them to vocabulary development.  We purchased software programs such as Tom Snyder’s “Essential Bingo” and “Quiz Show” programs to help devise vocabulary games.  The Essential Bingo program, for example, is cost effective (under $30), contains a built in dictionary of over 40,000 words, and can generate up to 16 different vocabulary games with just a couple keystrokes on the computer.  Teachers also made upvocabulary flashcards or went to www.flashcardexchange.com  where over 1,000,000 sets of flashcards exist or where they could make up their own.   Many of the flashcards are stored by publisher’s textbooks and may be found under title and chapter headings!   We also trained teachers to write FCAT-type vocabulary questions and encouraged principals to look for evidence of such questions during classroom observations and performance evaluations.   Finally, we actually had to add non subject specific vocabulary questions to the EXAMVIEW PRO test item banks of several publishers because such words were virtually non-existent among the literally thousands of test items in the publishers’ banks!  These were things that publishers could easily have made available to us.   Instead, publishers assumed that teachers would simply deal with these words in a manner as their individual circumstances might dictate.   They had not even begun to address the problem.   Throughout this period, I had a difficult time understanding why our district had to hire teachers to develop activities and test questions that were automatically part of any literature textbook resource package.4

As publishers began to dialogue with our district for the upcoming adoption, we began to urge that they take on the issue of non-subject specific vocabulary more directly.   I made it a point to try to keep both literature books and history books from a variety of publishers on my shelves to instantly refer to.   “How could publishers get it so right in the one case and not in the other?” we asked. 

Several examples of such conversations over the years come immediately to mind.  Due to our lengthy discussions about the need for them to address – among other things – non-subject specific vocabulary, I had the pleasure of reviewing several publishers’ texts for the upcoming adoption.   I personally called the senior editor of one book in her Manhattan office to discuss some pages from their book.  After praising them for having the word “scoff” defined at the bottom margin of one page I asked her how long they had been doing this.  She was happy to tell me what was new about this feature.  “Thanks for noting that.  You can see from this page that it’s one of our literature excerpts.  This time we’ve placed them right in the book as opposed to having them in a separate supplement.  We’ve always believed in rich vocabulary support for our literature excerpts, and I’m glad that you support our doing this.”   She had taken the bait.

I then directed her attention to many examples of non-subject specific words in the main history text across from this page and at other places in the same chapter.  Why wasn’t any definition of these words given at the bottom of the page or through the use of offsetting commas or parenthesis?  Didn’t she want the history section to have the same support for rich vocabulary development that the literature excerpt contained?  After a very long pause on the other end of the phone she confessed, “Well, we’ve never really thought of that.”   I responded by stating in Florida they needed to be thinking this way. “Our schools contain sizeable percentages of non-native speakers, society has changed, and if you want us to buy your books in a sequential, multiple year pattern, you should be thinking of moving in this direction.”   In my follow-up report to the company I wrote, “What is evident is that no publisher has yet taken the position of moving in the direction of addressing non-subject specific vocabulary within the regular text.  That you somewhat are aware of this is evident from your providing this same vocabulary ‘help’ in your text on page 931 of Chapter 31.   In this  “Literature” excerpt, you actually ‘help’ students with such words as ‘scoff’, ‘phosphates’, & ‘congenial’.   However, you assume students reading the history text will understand “machinations”, “waned”, “emulate”, “feverish”, “innovator”, “spurred”, “provincialisms”, “entrepreneur”, etc. etc. etc. when these words are encountered within the text on the pages just prior to and after page 931.  Publishers of sequentially developed instructional materials do a HUGE disservice to our student readers by not addressing this need nor providing teachers with the tools to do so themselves.  As a result, our teachers spend countless hours designing lessons, constructing “Jeopardy power point” games or using software such as Tom Snyder’s  “Essential Bingo” to make learning activities that enhance their students’ understanding of your books.”   

I later continued on the phone to another editor, “Just imagine a textbook series where difficult words are actually deliberately reintroduced or repeated over several chapters so that students are given engaging practice in challenging vocabulary!  Imagine test generators that allow us to click on whether we want the non-subject specific vocabulary for our ESOL or ESE students.  We have to provide increased reading support for a low performing students and your textbooks and test generators could actually play a major part in this!  Imagine how rather than be accused of ‘dumbing down’ our books, you could provide evidence of making them even more challenging and engaging.”   She hesitated.  The book was nearing completion and would be soon be ready for submission.   She thought I was calling for a total redesign of the textbook.  The cost would be enormous and it would require another year to complete.   “No.  That’s not necessary,” I argued.  “Just highlight the word in yellow or put more black ink on the word to draw attention to it.  You can provide support in the test generator and with graphic organizers.  You won’t have to change a single page and it won’t cost hardly anything.  Next cycle, however, we hope to see the ability to click on certain words in an electronic reading and hear them pronounced AND see a definition of the word.   If not in the main text, do this in your Primary Source CD ROM or at your website.”    Afterward, she promised the company would make a major commitment to this effort and actually hired a great many social studies teachers in Collier County to get the work completed.

While talking to another senior editor in Texas about the same issue, it was evident that his company had also made no plans to deal with the non-subject specific vocabulary.  That he liked the idea and feared others might, however, was evident from his telling question, “How many other companies have you all been discussing this with?”   “Everyone in the field” was my immediate reply.  “If we can get one company to do this, the rest of you won’t be far behind.”

There are other reasons why publishers ought to do these things, but the main impetus for Collier’s asking them to do so comes from a conversation I had with a former colleague, now a middle school principal in a neighboring county.   She called me a couple of summers ago to ask if I could work with her teachers on developing FCAT like questions for grade level, quarterly exams.  Although her school was an A+ school in Lee County, she was definitely a ‘take charge’ instructional leader who had high expectations for both her students and her staff.   I immediately saw this as one of those golden opportunities to show how well social studies could be used for increased student achievement.   “What are you currently doing with your Level I and II FCAT students?” I asked.   “Well, Jack, you won’t like hearing this, but for all level one students and some of the two’s we don’t really have them in social studies classes.   We have them in reading classes.”   That one hit  hard.  The principal was a former language arts chair and she wanted her students in a triple reading block.  They would get their historical and geographic understanding from reading historical fiction.  We talked awhile about how that left huge gaps in a child’s education.  I cautioned that reading “My Brother Sam is Dead” does not suffice for an adequate understanding of the American Revolution.  Nor, if all one is exposed to about World War II is a reading on the Holocaust, have we adequately prepared our students for understanding this monumental historical event.”   She confessed this was the sad state of affairs today’s schools are faced with.  Reading was paramount and although she couldn’t articulate why those literature books were better for preparing our students to be good readers, I didn’t want to give her any more ammunition about our text’s inherent weaknesses that would encourage her to justify that position.   Moreover, as the state begins to require more “uninterrupted” reading block time be made available for Level I & some Level II students, we may begin to see further erosion of the sequential study of history and other social studies courses at the secondary level.

     This principal was always ahead of the learning curve in her profession.  The sad truth is, she was right.  She knew by instinct what our teachers discovered through extensive analysis and research.   Nor is she alone in thinking that social studies classes can be easily restructured into lit circle groups and intensive reading classes, where ‘historical fiction’ – not history – becomes the main course for students.  These are the monumental stakes in our current textbook adoption.  Until publishers do a better job preparing our students to understand ALL the rich vocabulary students will encounter in our textbooks, the evisceration of our curriculum will continue.   It’s no longer enough to say ‘reading can be taught through the social studies textbook’.   Let’s ensure these textbooks as good as their literature counterparts!  Thus, it’s clear to us that social studies textbook publishers have a much greater responsibility today than ever before.   It’s not so much whether we will have the best textbook available to our students but whether their instructional design will allow us to continue to have the majority of our students reading such textbooks period.  Have they heeded our call in Florida?   Let’s open up the books submitted for state adoption and see for ourselves!

Jack Bovee is a 30-year social studies educator, a former elementary school principal, and now the coordinator for K-12 social studies in Collier County, Fla.   

Sources and Notes

    

1 Hart, Betty and Risley ,Todd R.   “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 4” is from Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, Copyright 1995, Brookes; www.brookespublishing.com, 1-800-638-3775; $29.00

2 Chall, J.S., & Jacobs, V.A  “Research Roundup: Poor Children’s Fourth Grade Slump” is from American Educator, Spring 2003.   

3 Sternberg, R.J. (1987). Most vocabulary is learned from context.  In M.G. McKeown & M.E. Curtis (eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition 89-106. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

4  In addition to these activities, we encouraged teachers to work on others that publishers sometimes suggest.  For example, we had department “word walls” in the main hallways as well as in the classroom.   September’s “Celebration of Freedom” law and Constitution Day provides us with a great month for featuring powerful vocabulary from such documents as the “Declaration of Independence” or from Presidential speeches.   Grade level teams were encouraged to divide up the calendar and assume responsibility for selecting a document and targeting specific vocabulary that could be exhibited on a large bulletin board in a heavily trafficked hallway or in the media center.