This article presents findings from an intervention across sixth and seventh grades to teach academic words to middle school students. The goals included investigating a progression of outcomes from word knowledge to comprehension and investigating the processes students use in establishing word meaning. Participants in Year 1 were two sixth-grade…

Word learning can build the high-quality word representations that support skilled reading and language comprehension. According to the partial knowledge hypothesis, words that are partially known, a.k.a. "frontier words" (Durso & Shore, 1991), may be good targets for instruction precisely because they are already familiar. However,…