Why Teach Tier II Words

It is a huge benefit to teach Tier II words because it helps students, not only in your class, but across the different content areas as well. As an ELA teacher, I have a great opportunity to teach vocabulary every week in my class! And the vocab is usually to help them have a better understanding of my Tier III words relating to a novel or topic in class, but it would be easy enough to include one Tier II work every week as well to broaden their vocabulary EVERYWHERE.

Teachers should teach words that will have the most impact on achievement. Tier II words are used across all subjects, common in text, and uncommon in everyday language/conversation. These words are critical to passage understanding, are multiple meaning words, likely to be encountered in the future, and useful across multiple areas of study.

Since Tier 2 words are uncommon in every day language it is important to teach these so students are exposed to the language they can use across multiple disciplines. Each student also has different background knowledge and experiences we need to address.

These words can be found across content areas and are more likely to be encountered in reading across many genres.

Some of the benefits of teaching Tier II words would be the fact that they are easily transferrable between content areas. Learning these words in English class will benefit students when the same words appear in science class. Also, they are words that are common beyond just high school classes and important for students to know. 

Tier II words are academic words that are used across subject areas and grade levels.  They are not super common in normal conversations so they need to be explicitly taught to students.  These words do not have to deal with the specific subject matter, but may ask students to look at it in a specific way (i.e. analyze, compare).  It's important to explicitly teach these words so that students are able to share the knowledge they have with more ease.

Teaching tier 2 words will help students across many content areas. Tier 2 vocabulary is not commonly used in conversational English, but rather in the academic context. Therefore, it's essential to explicitly teach this vocabulary especially to allow for ELLs to have better comprehension of this vocabulary. 

Many of the examples of Tier 2 words were verbs that could communicate to students how they should demonstrate their knowledge. Teachers are taught to be intentional in how they use Bloom's taxonomy to design tasks that have the correct level of challenge, but if students do not understand what these different tasks mean they may fall short of the teacher's expectations for an assignment. 

The benefits of teaching Tier II words include using words that are in all contexts and subjects. These are not common in everyday conversations. For example, one Tier II word that is often used is "cite." We use "cite" to give credit to a resource on a research paper. Other words that are mostly used along with cite include "evidence" and "distinguish." Tier II words help boost the vocabulary when it comes to the English language.