That's what I meant – in so many words

Many a child can point-and-click her way through a Sesame Street computer game before she can read. And plenty of young teenagers can build websites or even crack computer code.

Children often know far more than their parents do about new technology. But their ability to tell others about those achievements in eloquent terms may be suffering. Just ask anyone who's received an off-the-cuff e-mail from a teenager or has fled the dinner table as "like" is peppered six times into one sentence.

Bruce Penniman, an English teacher at Amherst Regional High School in Amherst, Mass., says students know more technical words than when he started teaching 30 years ago, but their knowledge of traditional vocabulary is waning. "The English language is promiscuous in its adoption of new words," he says. As the language grows, vocabularies will evolve to include more new words and fewer traditional ones.

But he doesn't attribute the shift exclusively to the influence of technology.

"There is so much more that is expected now," Mr. Penniman says. The curriculum has evolved during his tenure to include new skills, but at the same time, nothing has been taken away. As a result, some subjects receive less attention than they once did.

Still, Penniman says that for him and his colleagues, "vocabulary work is still a high priority."

Others worry, however, that specific attention to developing a substantive vocabulary is increasingly rare. Diane Ravitch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington and author of numerous books on education, says that in the 1960s, both verbal and math SAT scores fell. Math scores have since rebounded, but verbal scores have not made as much progress.

Ms. Ravitch attributes today's feeble scores to high-schoolers' poor vocabularies, and says the whole-language movement is a key culprit.

The movement, which has long been controversial and is in many ways falling out of favor, advocates the teaching of language totally in context. Spelling, vocabulary, and grammar are not studied separately, but are absorbed while students are reading.

The problem with this approach to teaching English, Ravitch says, is that "you're limited to the language that kids already know." She insists that students need to study each part of the language individually.

"If you were to study a foreign language, you would study vocabulary," she says. "We should do the same with our own language."

But others don't pin the issue on any one approach to teaching. Penniman, for example, does not believe that all linguistic instruction needs to be done by breaking the language down into parts.

He does, however, have his students study words after encountering them in a text. His students learn the meaning of the word and are required to define it in their own terms and use it correctly in context. But Penniman does not insist that his students memorize dictionary definitions.

Penniman says his students have probably already encountered the words he includes in his vocabulary assignments, but adds that they are "a stretch." He does not include words he thinks are so obscure that his students wouldn't encounter them again.

A recent list he assigned his ninth-grade class included such words as beguiling, flouting, insolence, indignation, and audacity.

In the age of technology, some say, it may seem less obvious to students that an impressive vocabulary and strong communication skills are important. More traditional cues, such as handwritten memos and references books, are no longer as common.

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