The Role of Staff Development in School-Based Management

Abstract

Today’s frontier is knowledge. Brain has taken precedence over brawn; our physical struggle forexistence has been replaced by intellectual struggle, and knowledge of words has become the mostvaluable tool for this struggle. Words are the very cornerstone of any language. With a good vocabulary,which indicates scope of knowledge, we can grasp the thoughts of others and be able to communicateour own thoughts to them. As Stahl (1999) argued, discussion of words is discussion of knowledge ofthe world, and knowledge of the world is knowledge of who we are and where we stand in the world.Also, the importance of words in foreign and second language learning is beyond question. Vocabularyknowledge is one of the language skills crucial for fluent language use (Nation, 1993). Vocabulary sizeis an indicator of how well the second language (L2) learners can perform academic language skillssuch as, reading, listening, and writing (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton and Johnston, 2008; Treiman andCasar, 1996). Numerous studies have documented the strong and reciprocal relationship betweenvocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (Baker, Simmons, & Kame’enui, 1995; Beck,McKeown, & Kucan, 2002; Graves, 2000; Stahl & Fairbanks, 1987;) as well as general reading ability(Stanovich, Cunningham, & West, 1998). Likewise, Saville-Troike, (1984) concluded that vocabularyknowledge is the single best predictor of students’ academic achievement across subject matterdomains. Also, there is a strong agreement among researchers that promoting vocabulary growth is animportant and often neglected component of a comprehensive reading program (Baumann &Kame’enui, 2004; National Reading Panel, 2000; Vaezi & Fallah, 2010).