![]() Such displays have value but no more than a typical bulletin board or chalkboard display. Teachers can provide a list of high frequency words (e.g., the, of, is, are, to) or lists of words that demonstrate particular spelling/ pronunciation patterns (e.g., can, man, pan, fan), morphological elements (e.g., s, es, ed, ing), or semantic relationships (e.g., transportation, air, land, water, boat). It accumulated as kids learned – providing a motivational bump (“look at all the words you’ve learned”). One of the ideas of the word wall was that it was developmental. That, of course, was not what Pat Cunningham was going for. That kind of thing can be a useful teaching tool, better than a whiteboard since it doesn’t have to be erased. Typically, such presentations list important points or reveal relationships (think of a list of classroom rules, a map of the United States with the states labeled, or a diagram revealing the parts of a cell or atom). Let’s think about what a word wall may provide to learners.Ī word wall can be just another display of information. What I will offer here will be opinions which may or may not be better than anyone else’s. I can’t tell you – based on any direct study -whether word walls, used in any way, are beneficial or not. Research is mute on this issue.Īlthough word walls have come in and out of fashion for 30 years, there isn’t a single published study on their effectiveness and the handful of relevant doctoral dissertations aren’t particularly helpful. As usual, my first concern was, “What does the research have to say?” That’s easy. Your question, and those sound walls that you asked about got me thinking. Those newer word walls focused on word meanings and I liked those a whole lot. Then I started to see some other uses for the word wall idea, often with older students. Copying spellings does little for building word knowledge. That gives them a lot of practice with phonemic sensitivity and decoding/encoding and provides the teacher with diagnostic information. I’d much rather have kids try to spell words as they think they are spelled. In K-2 (the grades in which word walls were so popular), that’s not the best kind of spelling support. During writing the kids could look up words they weren’t sure how to spell. The other popular use of the word walls was as spelling aides. Those word walls were an opportunity for the good readers to show off and for the poor readers to languish, a time waster at best. Often, they were mouthing without even looking at the words. I put reading in quotes there because I’d watch the kids while they put on these performances. Teachers, for instance, had students “reading” the words in unison to reinforce sight vocabulary. The two major ways I saw them being used made no sense to me. To tell the truth, while I like many of Pat’s instructional approaches (like “breaking words”), I was not a big fan of word walls. Patricia Cunningham’s “four block” was very popular and many teachers (and administrators) thought the epitome of high quality teaching was best demonstrated by lists of alphabetized high frequency words hanging from the classroom walls (Cunningham, 1991). Word walls?… man, I saw a lot of word walls during the 1990s. Usually when I think of word walls, one of the main focuses is either patterns, or meaning. They can be used to highlight word families, word meaning, word patterns for spelling and for affixes, or even vocabulary terms students have learned. ![]() A word wall can be a broad term that can include multiple ways of highlighting words in the classroom. I think these types of walls would be seen more in PreK, K and maybe 1st grade in the first semester. What are your thoughts about sound walls and word walls? I don't necessarily think these would replace a word wall.do you? The video and training can be found here for sounds walls: My response was this: I think for oral language, phonemic awareness and phonics the sound walls are awesome, and very helpful visually for beginning readers to unlock how sounds, symbols and words are put together.
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