Vocabulary instruction for Grades 3–8 English learners: An analysis of resources

Abstract

As current teacher educators, we often work with teachers who regularly use online resources for their lessons. We identified a popular website, Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT), that provides teacher-created classroom activities and materials. TPT has 5 million members and 3 million resources available (Teachers Pay Teachers, n.d.). In addition, many of our teacher candidates use online materials when creating lessons for their classroom assignments.Despite the popularity of TPT, there is little empirical research on the quality of resources, or how teachers find, use, and/or modify them, thus the need for our study. Pittard (2017) examined the discursive practices of two teachers as they created materials for the site, and an Education Week article focused on copyright laws (Schwartz, 2018). Recently, a new report examined high school English curriculum materials available online and found that most were "mediocre or probably not worth using (Polikoff & Dean, 2019, p. 11).This brief shares the results of an evaluation of free TPT vocabulary activities and materials for English learners (ELs), in third to eighth grade. Our questions were as follows: (1) What types of activities are included in these materials? (2) Do the activities follow effective practices as identified by the literature for vocabulary instruction for ELs? and (3) What type of guidance is provided with the materials?