Novel or nonfiction study is a great way to teach so many things: themes and symbolism, author’s craft and devices, literary analysis, and vocabulary too. But all too often, vocabulary gets relegated to a list with definitions that students memorize for a quiz or test...and likely forget soon after. Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to incorporate new vocabulary and language building activities into a novel or nonfiction study unit. Here are some of my favorite research backed methods.

Prioritize high frequency, high mileage words. Give no more than 10 words per week.

Try to prioritize high frequency words over very technical terms that are specific to that text. These high frequency words will be more helpful to students long term and can more easily be linked to synonyms and antonyms that students already know. Give students no more than 10 words per week.

Contextualize the new words by discussing how they are used, as well as synonyms and antonyms.

Include reference page numbers on the word list and discuss the sentence in which each word appears and the role of the word in that sentence. Have students write the sentence and come up with synonyms and antonyms as a class. This is a great way to reinforce the concepts of tone and connotation too.

Use a variety of language building activities.

Have students do a few of the following activities with the word list to aid in long term retention and language building:

• draw a picture or a diagram to depict the word

• act something out (charades style) related to each word

• paraphrase the definition

• write a couple of sentences using each word

• list the different word forms for each word (ex: decisive, decisively, decisiveness, indecisive, etc.)

• list and distinguish each word from similar sounding or often confused words (ex: affluence, influence; reticent, reluctant)

Use and encourage students to use the words in class discussions throughout the week.

In addition to using the words in discussions whenever possible, encourage students to use them. One idea is to create a word sentence wall—when a student uses the word correctly in a sentence, the sentence can be added to the wall. You could also consider some sort of bonus for correct use of the words in class discussions.

As a supplement, you can use the following two activities with any text: character traits vocabulary and grammar and vocabulary for any text. These activities can serve as no-prep, independent student work and can also be adapted to focus on certain words that you’d like to focus on.