Michael F. Shaughnessy
Senior Columnist EdNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University

1. You have recently published a small monograph entitled "Dictionary-Based Learning: the Personal-Best Route to Vocabulary Power, Reading Comprehension, and High Stakes Test Taking Success." What led you to write this document?

I came in through the back door, as it were. By this I mean that my concern with educational and career mobility moved away from community colleges to the growing importance of vocabulary power in pre-professional testing. My check of the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT indicates that over half of their 16 hours of test-taking time is devoted to vocabulary skills, including writing samples. So I felt it was time to bring the American dictionary into play as a tool aspiring pre-professionals could use on their own, especially inner city youngsters.

2) Why is "vocabulary power "important?

It's important because only 10% of our vocabulary \ is truly "English" in the sense that it comes from Anglo-Saxon. In contrast, any random 30-word check of a college-size dictionary (1200-1500 pp.) will reveal that 80% of them are Latinate English, which is to say they were borrowed into English from Graeco-Latinate sources, including Norman French. This means we must learn most of our vocabulary by rote — just like a pre-med student in Singapore. . . . Since a vocabulary, especially a medical-term vocabulary is an instrument of perception, not just communication, it's vocabulary growth that's essential for Anglophones, just as it is for their outsource verbal competitors in India.

3) I have to share with you that I relied on the Readers Digest when I was growing up to enhance and ameliorate my vocabulary skills and word power. Have the schools stopped pushing vocabulary development? . . . .

I loved the Readers Digest multiple-choice tests too, though I should point out that the one word-one meaning assumption simply doesn't hold up when you look at how many meanings are listed for RUN in a college size dictionary (well over 100). . . . As far as the schools go, I think the professional linguists following Chomsky focused almost exclusively upon sentence structure, as did the college professors. . . . For me that spelled an end to teaching Beowulf and Old Norse and even History of the English Language. . . . For students it's meant very little attention to etymology as a way of perceiving how Latinate English words like PSYCHIATRY are put together.


4) In your mind, what is the relationship between reading comprehension and word knowledge?

As the cliché goes, Mike, that's a Very Good Question, which is to say that didn't get around to thinking about it until a couple of months ago when I starting checking the NAEP reading comprehension questions, which struck me as short term memory questions, not meaning-in-context questions. . . . To my delight, I can report that most college-size dictionaries are quite generous with meaning-in-context phrases and sentences to illustrate specific definitions, enough so that I cover this point very zealously in my booklet in the hopes that teachers and educational leaders will be more aggressive in their use of dictionaries as test-construction tools and personal-best study tools. . . . It's the students and their time which produces learning, isn't it?

5) In some families, there is a robust effort to enhance and develop vocabulary. What do these families know that others don't?

First, they know how important Rules of the Game are (a deck of cards has always been the most accessible learning tool in American society. . . . Second, they know the importance of word games (Pig Latin, spelling bees, etc.). . . . There's also the importance of telling meaning-in-context jokes like "Why did Mickey Mouse become a spaceman. . . . Answer: He was looking for Pluto." When one of my grandsons (age 7) ran that one by me, I knew he was on the team and would stay there.

6) I believe it was Denis Waitley who indicated that broad word and vocabulary knowledge is one of the "seeds of greatness". How does a rich, robust vocabulary knowledge lend itself to success?

I think such knowledge induces caution, since Latinate English, as Orwell pointed out, encourages hypocrisy and self deception. Too bad the logical positivists and General Semanticists aren't more in favor these days.

7) How does vocabulary and word knowledge relate or correlate to high stakes test taking success?

First, they play a major role in fast high-comprehension reading of the questions themselves. Second, most science-math tests still rely upon "word problems."

8) Some teachers foster the " word " of the day. Why is it a beneficial habit to develop one's vocabulary skills?

I think it's beneficial because it keeps the focus upon vocabulary, not ideology, as a primary personal concern for speakers of a language whose vocabulary is a cognitive nightmare.

9) What question have I neglected to ask?

I think you've covered some fascinating areas. Right now, though, I've been thinking about meaning-in-context questions as indications of social adjustment, paralleling their use in Alzheimer's diagnoses, e.g., "What does the proverb Two Heads Are Better Than One mean to you?" (This was used for years by Kaiser Permanente and by the VA Hospital in Sepulveda). My hope is that dictionary-based questions, as opposed to private psychometric whim, will help our society discover who's right now using a different playbook, as the sports folks put it. . . . Better a vocabulary test, I'm sure you'll agree, than a car chase avec shoot out later on down the road.

Published March 7, 2007