Word wizards

MOSES LAKE — These students know how to use their words. Forty-two thousand, four hundred thirty-eight of them, in fact.

MLCA recently competed in the Vocabulary.com Vocabulary Bowl, and students demonstrated mastery of 42,438 words in a David-and-Goliath battle against schools with vastly larger teams.

“We were competing against hundreds, if not thousands of schools,” said Moses Lake Christian Academy English teacher Hannah Pease. “We finished seventh in the nation, out of every size school, even schools with over a thousand kids.”

MLCA, with fewer than 200 students in all grades, has been the top school in Washington for two years running in the Vocabulary.com Vocabulary Bowl, and this fall season placed second in the U.S. and Canada among schools with fewer than 500 students. The competition circled the globe with 966,716 participants, according to the website, from 20 countries.

MLCA seventh-grader Josiah Stuart took third place worldwide with 6,900 words.

“It was really rough, so much going back and forth,” Stuart said. “I went from first, then I dropped down to third. I was able to catch up in 11 days, and I was in second for a while, then all of a sudden, I dropped back to third. Another kid caught up and I dropped back to fourth and, like, the very last second, I was able to get back to third.”

Two other MLCA students placed in the top 40 worldwide. Eighth-grader Clarissa Shopbell came in at No. 40 with 1,642 words and ninth-grader Zoe Ferguson was 35th at 1,830 words. Overall, 16 MLCA students finished in the top 200. In addition to her students, Pease herself was ranked the top teacher worldwide.

The competition takes place over a two-month period from Oct. 1 to Nov. 30. Students answer questions online to demonstrate their knowledge of a given word.

“Most of them are four questions, but if you get them wrong, there’s more questions,” Shopbell said. “Some of them are longer, like eight to 10 questions. There are definitions and synonyms, sometimes pictures, and then you have to pick the right one that correlates with the word.”

“There are some words that are really easy, and some words that aren’t so common that are pretty difficult,” Ferguson said.

This is the second year MLCA has competed in the Vocabulary Bowl, Pease said. She discovered the competition a couple of years ago when she was researching ways to improve language acquisition. It’s had an effect, she said.

“Their language use has gone through the roof,” she said. “And their ability to read complex texts and analyze (them). It’s showing up everywhere.”

Unlike some competing schools, Pease’s students don’t get class time to work on the competition.

“My instruction doesn’t stop for this,” she said. “They do it on their own time, or if they have extra time at school. They’re very dedicated … They’re highly motivated kids. They want to do well; they want to learn. And some of them are so competitive that if you put a task in front of them, they’re going to do anything they can to achieve that task.”