Part 3 in a Series: Building Your Students’ Vocabulary

LINCS is a mnemonic device for ingraining new words. It helps students to make memorable connections and relationships between the word and it’s meaning.For example, I vividly remember the first time I heard the word minuscule as a child. I looked up the definition (because in contrast to many of my future students, I was bookish) and read that it meant “extremely small; tiny.” In my mind I made a connection that “minuscule” sounded like “mini school” and to this day I invision a teeny tiny school anytime I hear the word minuscule. That’s the type of thing that children with normal language do naturally. Unfortunately, our students with language impairments do not do it naturally. In fact, they have a hard time doing it at all – even with our training and lots of practice.

This is the LINCS strategy; a way to give a word meaning that will “stick.”

As you can tell, the strategy uses visual imagery and associations to create a (hopefully) powerful memory between a word and its meaning. The University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning explains why it works:

Research supporting the LINCS strategy is impressive. A study was conducted in a social studies class, and the LINCS strategy was taught to the students in that class. Learning disabled students in the class performed a mean of 53 percent correct on a pretest and then at a mean of 77 percent correct after learning and using the strategy. Interestingly enough, students in the control class who did not learn the strategy actually decreased from pretest to posttest.