Graphic organizers are a great way to learn vocabulary and understand the word's relationship with the text. According to the Virginia Department of Education website, "Graphic organizers or visual images enhance vocabulary instruction and incorporate vocabulary into students' long-term memory." (2012)
Visual images of any kind can be useful for helping students to remember and understand vocabulary. According to Literacy in Context, combining words with visual images is effective for building student understanding of vocabulary. This text also suggests using semantic mapping (another vocabulary strategy) to show relationships between vocabulary words and their meanings. (Miller and Veatch, 2011) Creating visual images can also help students to be actively involved in the learning process, which according to Eileen Carr and Karen Wixson in the Words Alive Acquisition Model, is one of the four guidelines for evaluating vocabulary instruction: "students should be actively involved in learning." (English and Reading, 2012) |