If you were a reading specialist in a middle school, which of these should you be sure to know?

While there seems to be varied views about the best ways in which meanng vocabulary can be developed, one area where there is strong consensus regards the effectiveness of incidentally learning new word meanings.
 
Having students participate in product-oriented semantic mapping fails to engage them with the in-depth processing of word meanings that occurs with process-oriented semantic mapping.
 
Asking students to look up words in a dictionary to determine their meanings can be helpful at times, but in other cases would be viewed as a weak form of instruction. Teachers should use the dictionary as a part of a meaning vocabulary instructional program, judiciously.
 
While highly useful when teaching students word identification strategies, teacher modeling is less supportive in meaning vocabulary instruction, especially with older students.