Diverse High School Students' Academic Vocabulary Knowledge: Implications for Academic Achievement Across Disciplines

Objective: The purpose of this research was to examine academic vocabulary gains of diverse high school students as well as the predictive utility of different dimensions of academic word knowledge for achievement across academic disciplines.

Theoretical Framework: The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) increased the already heightened attention to academic vocabulary and its role in academic achievement (Galloway, Lawrence, Moje, 2013; Palumbo, Kramer-Vida, & Hunt, 2015). Given the high stakes exams that are linked to graduate requirements in some CCSS states (McIntosh, Kober, Rentner, & Ferguson, 2012), vocabulary knowledge has important implications for students’ academic growth and success, which is evidenced with younger adolescents in numerous studies (Lesaux, Kieffer, Kelley, & Harris, 2014; Townsend, Filippini, Collins, & Biancarosa, 2012). However, there is little empirical data on the academic word knowledge of high school students.

Methods: Diverse high school students (N = 865) from one school in a metropolitan school district in the western U.S. were tested on their semantic, spelling, and morphological knowledge of academic words. The measure of semantic knowledge was the Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham, 2001), the measure of spelling knowledge was the Academic Vocabulary Spelling Inventory (AVSI; (Townsend, Bear, & Templeton, 2009), and the measure of morphological knowledge was the Nonword Suffix Choice (Kieffer & Box, 2013). Scores on standardized measures of academic achievement across disciplines were also obtained. Individual group t-tests and linear regression analyses were used to determine, respectively, between-group differences and the predictive utility of academic word knowledge for achievement across disciplines.

Results: Preliminary findings suggest two important trends. First, different patterns of performance occur depending on how multilingual students are labeled. For example, students who self-identify as having a home language other than English are outperformed by their monolingual English-speaking peers on reading, t(250) = 2.58, p < .05, and science t(372) = 2.81, p < .01, on the High School Proficiency Exam (HSPE), while district-designated formerly limited English proficient (LEP) students are outperformed by their monolingual English-speaking peers on math, t(348) = 2.07, p < .05, and science, t(497) = 2.97, p < .01. The second pattern in the preliminary analyses is the predictive utility of dimensions of academic word knowledge for academic achievement across disciplines. Combined dimensions of academic word knowledge predicted 30% of the variance in reading, 20% of the variance in math, 28% of the variance in science, and 17% of the variance in writing.

Significance: High school is a challenging time for students who have experienced Matthew Effects in literacy development (Stanovich, 1986). Their opportunities to develop vocabulary and background knowledge diminish with each year they struggle as readers, yet are given grade-level texts without sufficient instructional support. The more that teachers understand the academic literacy needs of their students, and, in particular, their academic vocabulary development, the greater chance teachers and students may have of decreasing achievement gaps.