The Words Students Need and How They Can Learn Them: Teaching Literary Vocabulary in the Twenty-First Century

This article asserts the importance of disciplinary vocabulary, especially in literature classes. Disciplinary trends in the last few decades shifted our focus away from “surface” features like poetic form, leaving our students bereft of the vocabulary for describing those features. In light of recent scholarly emphases, I argue that we need to recover this vocabulary and that, as research in cognitive science and education demonstrates, merely asking students to look up terms in a glossary does not allow them to master it. I then describe two methods for systematically integrating disciplinary vocabulary into a course syllabus, using digital tools both to give students practice in applying these terms and to increase their motivation to do so.