Vocab Learning technique suggested by tutor

[united4ever]

My son is year 4. He started with a tutor in September. Whilst nothing was mentioned by his teacher at school parents evening the tutor thinks his vocabulary is very weak, I tend to agree. His mother is also non native speaker and at home mostly speak another language though I am English and speak English with him.

The tutor suggested this over Easter. When reading a book, when you come to a word you don't understand, write it down in a notebook and look it up in dictionary. I can see how this can be good but it certainly interrupts the flow of a book and to a large extent the pleasure. He generally gets the story anyway even if 5 or 6 words per page he doesn't understand. Do you think this is a good approach? - I am scared of putting him off reading which he enjoys.

He previously liked books like David Walliams and Diary of a wimpy kid but the tutor thinks they are not good really so gave us a reading list which includes stuff by Joan Aitken, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton and some others. We mentioned he found Harry Potter too difficult - she said he should be able to read that by now.

As i say, his school teacher has not raised any issues and his maths seems fine.

My ds uses electronic dictionary which is way easier for younger child to look up.
My ds used to make his word book, and when he encountered new word, he has written it down. Don't do it anymore, but still quickly look up on dictionary. He uses learn function on the dictionary to store new words he learned.

By the way, I am a non native English speaker, so my English vocab is very poor, but it doesn't seems to have affected my ds at all.

I am tutor, and I sort of agree with what she is saying, but recommend doing it like this.
have a notebook and pen, when you find a word you don't know, jot it down, quickly and quickly explain it enough to go on with the story. At this point the flow of the book is most important. If it is your book you could underline it in pencil in the book.
Then at another time look at those words, look up meaning, I recommend googling it. Scroll down the meanings until you find one he understands. Write down the meaning, but write down synonyms and antonyms as well, as they ar eusually easier to grasp the meaning of the word, and a couple of example sentences.

Deal with no more than 10 words at a time, and review them over the course of a week. You could have a prize jar/chart, eg anyone who manages to use one of this week's words in normal conversation gets a sweet out of the jar.

As the words get learnt, add in new ones, so you should be able to learn 10 words a week.

I disagree about books. Joan Aitken is very dated, and hard to read for most kids. A good ruel of thumb is the one hand rule. Read one page at random, and start with a flat hand. For every word that you don't know/can't easily guess on context fold down one finger. If you fold down all the fingers of one hand on one page it is porbably too hard to read ot yourself (but may be a good one to read aloud)
The biggest aid to learning vocab is making sure he really does read and read and read, every day.

BUT he is bilungual. That means that if a typical 8 year old has a vocab of sya 3,000 words (I have no idea what the actual figure is) and his English vocab is a bit low, eg 2,500, you must remember that his actual vocab is double that, as he knows those words in English and his other language, so he has much bigger language than his contemporaries, around 5,000 for example. The challenge is to make sure he has a broad vocab in both, and one thign that can happen is that he might develop 'school words' vocab in English and 'home words' vocab in his home language, so it requires a bit of effort to keep it borad in both

sorry, loads of typos

Kindle is great for this, you can highlight a word and immediately look at the definition but it also saves it so you can go back over them later. For kids it also has something called word wise which will automatically give a brief explanation of tricky text above the word.
I wouldn't recommend reading on a tablet for a child but on a dedicated ereader it's fabulous. For my y4 Dd another added benefit is that she can use a dyslexia friendly font for her books and get the words exactly the right size for comfortable reading.

I agree to a point - always encouraged my children to have a plain card bookmark - note down any new interesting words, then look them up later and use them. I do this myself - we're never too old to learn!

Another way to extend vocabulary, especially for a non native speaker is to develop the number of word categories you have available. You could do this with your son as a challenge. On a whiteboard choose a category, you could start of with something simple like nouns, big cats was one my pupils always enjoyed, over a few days write on as many big cats as you can lion tiger leopard are the obvious ones then you might have to research to get more unusual ones. See how many you can find - my kids used to rush to add new words and got peeved if someone else thought of it first. After a few days change the category. Eg fish, mammals , garden birds, trees, vehicles, dwellings etc etc. Move on to more abstract categories, like emotions, ways of speaking, ways of moving, weather conditions. The point is that these are not complicated or difficult words, your son probably already knows them, but an education advisor I met had done some research and found that being able to access and associate words with each other was a good way to develop stronger working vocabulary and recall skills . It's about making mental links and associations so that you have a greater range of choices to pick from.

Looking up unknown words is also great, but you need to think of ways to associate them with language and language structures you already know and use. So put the words into sentences, or different sorts of sentences, can you use the words in a question, or in a statement, make them into plurals or different tenses.

Another thing you can do is pre teach vocabulary.Keep an eye on what is upcoming in the school curriculum. Is your son going to be doing a project on the Romans next term? Then get a few easy books on the Romans and look out for tricky vocabulary to preteach. Century, centurion, forum, senator, etc etc. Same for science, and maths, ask his teacher what topics they are covering, familiarise him with the vocabulary. The language of science and maths is often very subject specific and it is sometimes quite difficult for children with EAL to grasp this.

that is great viques.
really agree with this too:

Looking up unknown words is also great, but you need to think of ways to associate them with language and language structures you already know and use.

I always think that learning a meaning doesn't really help, I find it helps to learn it in a set of synonyms or antonyms.

Yes, I totally agree with visque and steppemum. My ds uses thesaurus a lot more than dictionary. Learning a word + synonyms and antonyms at the same time will definitely increase vocab massively.

https://www.vocabularyninja.co.uk/vocabulary-laboratory.html