7:2 MEDIUM

When and where found: I found this word while reading Lauren's reciprocal teaching article.  I circled it and remembered I found a word in that article, so I went back to it.  To refresh our memories, the article was titled Teaching Students to Comprehend Informational Text Through Rereading by Hedin and Conderman.  The section I found it in was about specific text features and it was the topic sentence in the paragraph.

What it means: MEDIUM in the sense it was being used was to refer to a specific type of text or format of communication.  The sentence I found it in was: "Informational text proved to be an excellent medium for teaching students to reread because of its text features..." (2010, p. 558).

Level of Familiarity: I consider myself moderately familiar with this word, professionally in our coursework and personally.  Understanding different mediums and their specific purpose lies at the heart of my understanding of being a literacy educator.  If I can instill in my students the numerous different purposes change how we communicate, then my students will begin to be meta-cognizant of their interactions (Fisher & Frey, 2008); therefore, my students will have strong literacy skills to operate in the complex and "deictic" world we live in (Leu, 2000).

To know well...or not? YES, we as literacy educators NEED to have a deep word knowledge of MEDIUM (Fisher & Frey, 2008).  In addition, I would argue MEDIUM is a "technical vocabulary" word for literacy educators; however, many lay people would consider it "specialized" (Fisher & Frey, 2008, p. 12, 13).

References:

Fisher, D. and Frey, N. (2008). Wordwise and content rich: Five essential steps to teaching academic vocabulary. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Hedin, L. R. and Conderman, G. (2010). Teaching students to comprehend informational text through rereading. The Reading Teacher, 63(7), pp. 556-565. DOI: 10.1598/RT.63.7.3

Leu, D. J. (2000). Literacy and technology: Deictic consequences for literacy education in an informational age. Handbook of Reading Research, 3, pp. 743-770.