When teaching English, especially to 8th graders this year, I have to be conscious of opportunities to expand vocabularies. Supposedly, the typical young teen knows between 8 and 12 thousand words - as compared to 20 to 40 thousand for adults. That's a big gap!
Sometimes I will ask the students if they know a particular word and then have them rate it on a scale of 1 to 5 fingers: 1 finger up indicates "I've never seen or heard that word in my entire life" while 5 fingers up means "I know that word well enough to use it in a sentence".
What I find is that most words fall in the 2 to 4 finger range - "It sounds familiar but I really couldn't tell you what it means with confidence."
Here's another thing I have realized about students and vocabulary: Just because you have the dictionary definition of a word memorized does not mean you truly KNOW that word. A student can memorize a definition and still be unable to use the word correctly in a sentence.
And it seems to me that if you cannot correctly USE the word, it is not really part of your vocabulary.
Over the past year or two, I have begun to wonder what kind of grip we have on some common biblical terms. Words like "faith" and "wisdom" and "truth" and even "love". What about "righteousness" and "sin"?
What if God means something different - deeper - by a particular term than we think he means? What if we're giving a biblical term 5 fingers when in reality we can't correctly use it in a sentence? Is it really a part of our working vocabulary?
Tomorrow I will try to illustrate what I mean by showing how the Lord expanded my understanding of the phrase "God's will".
No comments:
Post a Comment