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‘Thesaurus’ comes from the Greek—a storehouse or treasury. The Shorter Oxford English dictionary gives 1736 for the English usage ‘a treasury or storehouse of knowledge, as a dictionary, encyclopaedia or the like’. In 1852, Peter Mark Roget published his Thesaurus of English words and phrases: ‘a collection … arranged, not in alphabetical order as they are in a dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express… The object aimed at is, the idea being given, to find the word, or words, by which that idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed.’ All who write English have heard of this thesaurus.

Purpose – To describe an instructional activity for developing vocabulary knowledge in clinical and classroom settings.Design/methodology/approach – The chapter describes the use of a strategy called Word Wizard in one-on-one tutoring situations, and the effectiveness of the strategy in terms of students’ word learning.Findings – Students learned over 60% of the words taught. The number of times a word was seen, heard, or spoken by students was predictive of the scores on one measure of word knowledge. The scores of students who were ELL were lower than native English speakers on another measure.Research limitations/implications – Each student’s words were different, and the students were from grades 2 to 11. While the strategy was successful for most students, it may be that it is more successful as a group activity with higher elementary and middle-school students.Practical implications – The Word Wizard activity can be implemented successfully in classrooms and clinical settings.Originality/value of chapter – The study provides further evidence for the implementation of Word Wizard activities in a variety of educational settings.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to provide research-based information to foster positive discussions about the need for phonics and phonemic awareness instruction in the primary grades. In order to read, students must possess secure knowledge of the alphabetic principle (i.e., that speech sounds are represented by combinations of letters in the alphabet) as well as the ability to aurally separate the distinct sounds (phonemes) that make up words.

Design: In this chapter, the authors provide essential definitions of phonics and phonemic awareness terms, highlight peer-reviewed research and best instructional practices, and clarify findings in relation to the recently renewed controversy over how to effectively teach reading to young children. The authors draw from respected research journals and years of classroom experience to provide recommendations to literacy teachers.

Findings: Explicit, systematic phonics instruction is crucial for beginning readers because most children will not intuit phonics concepts. To set the stage for phonics instruction (connecting speech sounds with their written representations), students must understand how to separate sounds in words. Therefore, instruction in phonemic awareness must be given independently of alphabetic representations; that is, students need to be able to hear the distinct sounds before mapping them onto written words. Once a student has mastered this understanding, however, instructional time need not be devoted to its development.

Practical Implications: This chapter contributes to the literature on phonics and phonemic awareness by clearly explaining the differences between the two concepts and their necessary inclusion in any beginning reading program. It includes practical activities teachers can use to develop these understandings in the classroom and provides research evidence to support their use.

Purpose – This chapter describes an assessment tool that not only contains all of the good qualities of formative assessments, in that it informs teaching and is based on systematic observation of the learner engaged in reading and writing, but also possesses the same good qualities as standardized assessments, in that a student's performance can be compared to other students over time.

Methodology/approach – The chapter begins with an overview of Clay's interactive literacy processing theory. The value of using observation is discussed and a case is made that when observations are conducted in a systematic way, the assessment can possess all the same qualities of a good standardized instrument. Two first-grade students' assessment data from the Observation Survey (OS), one a struggling reader and the other working at low-average level, are shared in order to demonstrate how to interpret the assessment data using Clay's literacy processing theory and how to use those interpretations to inform teaching.

Practical implications – Systematic observation of children engaged in reading, and writing continuous text, allows the teacher to observe behaviors that can be used to infer what a reader is using and doing while reading.

Value – This assessment information can be used to effectively scaffold literacy instruction and a child's reading performance.

We study organizational vocabularies as complex social structures emerging from the association between organizational participants and words they use to describe and make sense of their experiences at work. Using data that we have collected on the association between managers in a multi-unit international company and words they use to describe their organizational units and the overall company, we examine the relational micro-mechanisms underlying the observed network structure of organizational vocabularies. We find that members of the same subsidiary tend to become more similar in terms of the words they use to describe their units. Members of the same subsidiary, however, do not use the same words to describe the corporate group. Consequently, the structure of organizational vocabularies tends to support consistent local interpretations, but reveals the presence of divergent meanings that organizational participants associate with the superordinate corporate group.

A substantial number of students read significantly below grade level, and students with disabilities perform far below their non-disabled peers. Reading achievement data indicate that many students with and at-risk for reading disabilities require more intensive reading interventions. This chapter utilizes the theoretical model of the Simple View of Reading to describe the benefit of early reading instruction, targeting both word reading and word meaning. In addition, evidence is presented supporting the use of word meaning instruction to improve accurate and efficient word reading for students who have failed to respond to explicit decoding instruction.

A growing body of research outlines how to best facilitate and ensure methodological rigor when using dictionary-based computerized text analyses (DBCTA) in organizational research. However, these best practices are currently scattered across several methodological and empirical manuscripts, making it difficult for scholars new to the technique to implement DBCTA in their own research. To better equip researchers looking to leverage this technique, this methodological report consolidates current best practices for applying DBCTA into a single, practical guide. In doing so, we provide direction regarding how to make key design decisions and identify valuable resources to help researchers from the beginning of the research process through final publication. Consequently, we advance DBCTA methods research by providing a one-stop reference for novices and experts alike concerning current best practices and available resources.