Semantic Feature Analysis With Kindergarten Intervention Students by Mary Lou Shuster Mary Lou Shuster is a certified literacy specialist in her 35th year of teaching. She has worked the past ten years as a reading specialist, reading interventionist, and instructional coach. Prior to coaching, she taught kindergarten for 24 years, all in the same Maine school district, RSU #6. She is currently at Buxton Center Elementary School in Buxton, ME. She is a National Writing Project Teacher Consultant and has her Certificate of Advanced Studies in Literacy from the University of Southern Maine where she is also an adjunct teacher. She blogs about books at http://litcoachlou. blogspot.com/ and her Twitter handle is @litcoachlou
he answers come with confidence from these kindergarten intervention students as they discuss one of the friendship traits on their Semantic Feature Analysis:
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“Boys and Girls, what evidence can you give me from any of the books we have read that proves, the idea: ‘Friends help each other.’” “In Stick and Stone, Stick helps Stone out of the water by splashing. In I Can Help, the elephant helps the zebra stop being grumpy by giving him a hat. Mrs. Diggs helps Widget by giving him a home.”
These are the conversations of five-year-old kindergarten students identified for interventions due to their lack of foundational skills, low scores on our district screening tool and teacher recommendations. Yet these same students are engaging in high-level talk around picture books and are providing clear evidence to compare and contrast friendship traits among these books. How can this be? And if they can do this work what does it tell us about our youngest learners?
which the concepts can be compared. (Johnson & Pearson, 1978, p. 38). I was first introduced to this strategy as a graduate student in Dr. Michael O’Donnell’s class at our local university, entitled Improving Teaching in the Content Areas. As soon as I started my masters’ program I made a promise to myself—I will use kindergarten for every assignment required of me, in every class. Never is it tested more than when I take Dr. O’Donnell’s content literacy class. When assigned a semantic feature analysis map, I thought I might have met my match, but with some reflection, see it is indeed possible and my first semantic feature analysis map was completed with life cycles in kindergarten. The life cycles we use are pumpkins, apples, butterflies, and seasons. Some of the vocabularies compared across these topics are “flower,” “changes,” “cycle,” and “decomposes.” Students need conceptual understanding among concepts in order to differentiate. When a semantic feature analysis strategy is used, students complete a big piece of the work through discussions, questions and the use of “close reading.” The term close reading is defined by Patricia Kain for the Writing Center at Harvard University this way: “It is about making careful observations of a text and then interpretations of those observations” (1998, p.1). Doug Fisher defines close reading as “an interaction between the reader and a text” (2012, p. 2). This strategy, one in which the students are active participants in their own learning, is achieved as they interact with both the texts and each other. Active learning is an effective way to learn and retain information.
What Is a Semantic Feature Analysis?
Background
Johnson & Pearson (1978) first developed this strategy to use with vocabulary: With a Semantic Feature Analysis chart or grid, one can examine related concepts but make distinctions between them according to particular criteria across
As a literacy specialist I am responsible for interventions for identified kindergarten students pulled from five classrooms in my school. We are a rural district with a free and reduced lunch rate of 54%, an enrollment of 90 kindergarten students, a total of 575 65
