Due 1/27/10

As a continuation of my previous post, I am interested in finding ways to help my students better understand the vocabulary they will be confronted with in the business education curriculum. I was inspired by some of the ideas introduced in Chapter 4 of the book, Improving Adolescent Literacy. I would like to research literature on this idea of using different methods in the classroom to handle the content vocabulary.  If I can help my students with the vocabulary it should improve their overall reading skills which will be very useful for them in all areas of their education.  I would like to see what happened when other educators tried some of these different methods and if they thought the techniques were successful. I am very interested in finding out if the students responded favorably and were fully engaged, for the most part. Technical reading skills are necessary in the business world which differs from the type of reading skills that are impressed upon the students in a typical English class.  Those types of classes typically focus on reading and interpreting literature and poems.  The ability to interpret and understand multiple types of documents including directions, graphs, charts, and manuals are just some examples of what is necessary and required reading skills in the business world.  If we as educators can successfully tackle the content level vocabulary, teaching these other reading skills is going to be easier and more hopefully more interesting to students instead of a being a study in frustration for all of us.