Robust Academic Vocabulary Encounters (RAVE): Enhancing Academic Vocabulary Knowledge and Comprehension in Middle School Students

Robust Academic Vocabulary Encounters (RAVE) is an instructional intervention aimed to enhance academic vocabulary knowledge and comprehension across two years of middle school, sixth and seventh grades. RAVE teaches general academic words from the Academic Word List (AWL) through instruction that provides multiple varied contexts, active processing of words and word uses, and attention to morphology through instruction in Latin roots. The activities in RAVE were designed to guide students to create multifaceted representations of word meanings based on elements of meaning similarity and difference demonstrated by various contexts. RAVE lessons use pairs of authentic contexts that illustrate how a word is used in various domains, a definition built around core meaning, and prompts to integrate word meaning and context. Follow-up activities promote active use of the words, and attention to morphology is instantiated through instruction in Latin roots.