PROMINENT CONTENT VOCABULARY STRATEGIES AND WHAT SECONDARY PRESERVICE TEACHERS THINK ABOUT THEM

This investigation focused on two research questions. The first question examined what specific instructional strategies for teaching vocabulary appear most frequently in current content area textbooks. The second question built on the first and used that information to develop a survey that was administered to secondary-level preservice teachers to examine their familiarity with the particular strategy, to rate the strategy's usability within their content area, and to rate whether they would use the strategy in their future teaching. The top-five most prominent strategies found across the textbooks were morphemic analysis, contextual analysis, semantic feature analysis grid, semantic mapping, and vocabulary self-collection. The student survey revealed the most familiarity with contextual analysis and semantic mapping. These two strategies also were favored in the usability and the intention to use in future teaching promptings. Using a chi-square statistical procedure we found that seven statements were differentially affected by the reported content area of the teacher.