Book excerpt: Veteran educator Marilee Sprenger explains how to teach the essential, high-frequency words that appear in academic contexts--and reverse the disadvantages of what she calls "word poverty." Drawing on research and experience, Sprenger provides a rich array of engaging strategies to help educators across all content areas and grade levels not only teach students a large quantity of words but also ensure that they know these words well. You'll find An overview of how the brain learns and retains new words, including the three stages of building long-term memories: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Encoding strategies to introduce words in novel ways and jump-start the memory process. Rehearsal strategies to help students put words into long-term storage. Review strategies to help students strengthen their retrieval skills and gain the automaticity needed for reading comprehension. Ways to address planning and assessment as crucial, intersecting supports of a robust vocabulary program. This comprehensive resource has everything you need to help your students profoundly expand their vocabulary, enabling them to speak, read, and write with greater understanding and confidence.