Word Generation is designed to provide teachers with opportunities to practice strategies for teaching vocabulary that they can by apply more broadly and easily incorporate into established routines. Teachers across the content areas have told us they recognize their students' problems with vocabulary, but don't always know how best to help them. Word Generation presents teachers with a common language for discussing literacy and comprehension strategies across the curriculum. The program incorporates research-based principles of vocabulary learning, such as the need for multiple exposures to target words distributed over several days and different contexts, which can be difficult to honor in traditional vocabulary curricula.  

A single program cannot address all the literacy needs of adolescent readers. However, programs targeting this population should be appropriate for the reading levels of the students involved and should allow for different learning styles, abilities, backgrounds, and interests. Activating prior knowledge; providing varied, high quality texts; linking texts and the lives of children; and facilitating collaborative interaction with the text are crucial components of successful programs.