3 Vocabulary Strategies Help

Decipher Unknown Words

BY MIDDLEWEB · PUBLISHED 09/27/2015

By Brenda J. Overturf
How powerful can one word be?

Jacob, a seventh grader, sits staring at a challenging text he has tried to read. He
knows the other words in the paragraph but is stuck on a multisyllabic word he
has never seen before. Jacob sounds out the word, but because he has also never
heard it, it still doesn’t make sense.

Finally, he just gives up and moves on. Yet the one word Jacob doesn’t know
holds the key to comprehending the entire passage. Sound familiar? Kids like
Jacob occupy many middle level classrooms, and they are not necessarily
struggling readers.

Deciphering tools are essential to lifelong learning

Vocabulary knowledge is the heart of comprehension and academic achievement,
and it means way more than just learning words. Don’t get me wrong – learning a
lot of words is incredibly important. Kids have to acquire and understand a
multitude of words to read and learn in and out of school.

But we couldn’t teach students every word or phrase they might encounter in
text even if we had time to introduce them within our tightly packed schedules.
Although knowing high-utility words and phrases is vital for comprehension, to
be lifelong learners kids also need to have strategies at their fingertips to
decipher unfamiliar words.

Vocabulary researchers often point to three strategies that learners apply in

order to determine the meanings of unfamiliar words independently (Graves,
2006; 2007):

(1) use of context,

(2) use of word parts, and

(3) use of reference materials.

For those teachers implementing the Common Core State Standards, these three
strategies make up Language Anchor Standard 4. They can lead students across
content areas to understand words in text and make a big difference in
comprehension and subject matter learning. If kids don’t know how to use word-
learning strategies, we have to teach them.
Strategy 1: Use of Context
One strategy is that of using sentence or passage-level context to infer the
meaning of a word or phrase. Although some researchers feel that use of context,
which is an “around-the-word” strategy, is not always reliable (that is, the
context may not be rich enough to help students actually understand the
meaning of a word or may lead them to a wrong conclusion), others have found
that most new words are learned from context.

Also, increasingly, standardized assessments require students to read a passage

with an underlined word, answer a multiple choice question with four possible
definitions of the word, and then answera second related multiple choice
question where the object is to provide evidence from the passage that supports
the chosen definition.
Students may struggle with context
In a vocabulary test question, context equals evidence. But deciding what
constitutes context is not always easy for students. When Trish, a seventh grade
English language arts teacher, began asking her students to indicate the parts of a
passage that provided context clues to an underlined word, she was astonished.

As Trish put it, “I was shocked! This is the hardest thing in the world for them to
do. The clue is blatantly there, and they don’t see it.”

Other teachers feel that some students may not even understand the
term context. One sixth grade teacher had this to say: “It’s almost like the
phrase context clues is something they have just never heard before. We have to
teach them how to look for clues so they can figure out word meanings.”
One way teachers have found to emphasize context is to introduce selected
vocabulary within cloze sentences – a sentence with a blank where the word
should go.
 (Thanks to
Larry Ferlazzo)
Tonie, an English language arts teacher, pulled sentences from a short story that
students were preparing to read and wrote the sentences on paper strips which
she attached to her bulletin board. She also wrote the seven vocabulary words
she planned to introduce on word cards.

After introducing the words, Tonie asked students to work in groups to decide
which word went into a particular blank. They then had to justify their answers
by describing the context clues that helped them make a decision. This not only
helped them become more familiar with important vocabulary and how to use
context, it also served as a predictive activity that piqued student interest but did
not reveal too much of the story.
A Social Studies example using slides
In social studies, Stephen introduced the word interdependence, a powerful
concept word for his seventh graders. To begin, he created a series of five simple
PowerPoint slides. The first slide contained a sentence with a blank where the
word should go. The next three slides contained clues to lead students to the
word interdependence.
For example, Stephen displayed a diagram of a car with parts made in several
different countries, a quote from The Lion King about the circle of life, and the
dictionary definition of interdependence. With each slide, he engaged students in
a lively discussion about the information on the slide and what the word might
be.
On the last slide, Stephen showed students the sentence with the word included.
By asking them to predict the word that would go in the blank and think about
clues along the way, he was also teaching his students in a way that guaranteed
they would remember the word as they learned social studies content.
 Strategy 2: Use of
Word Parts
Imagine a fifth grade class where a teacher can hold up a card with a word
like abolitionist written on it, and within a minute small groups of students have
figured out the meaning of the word—without the teacher uttering one sound.
This is not an imaginary classroom. Leslie Montgomery, who teaches in a high
poverty public elementary school, regularly witnesses this phenomenon. Her
students have learned the power of using the meanings of prefixes, roots, and
suffixes (especially common Greek and Latin roots) to figure out the meanings of
words.

As they talk through their reasoning, it is clear her students are developing
“morphological awareness,” or understanding about the structure and origin of
words. This skill can often seem like magic to kids, but is really sophisticated
vocabulary knowledge that they need in order to learn at higher levels.

Going down to the roots

Using the meanings of word parts to determine the meaning of a multisyllabic
word is an “in-word” strategy that can open the doors to thousands of new
words. More than 60 percent of words in an English dictionary stem from Greek
and Latin roots, and in science and technology, it is more like 90 percent (Moats,
2000).
Most researchers agree that middle level students need to develop
morphological awareness to comprehend challenging texts across the
curriculum. Yet research shows that many students reach middle school without
this crucial skill (Graves, 2006).

Also
see: How to Rock Greek and Latin Roots
When I asked a group of middle school teachers about their students’ use of word
parts, most were convinced that their students did not know the meanings of the
simplest affixes like un-and im- (not), much less Greek and Latin roots
like graph (to write), therm (heat), or port (to carry). The performance of their
students did not do much to persuade them otherwise.
Tonie taught her seventh grade students that there is a small list of affixes that
can be found in most words with prefixes or suffixes. This knowledge was
powerful for her students and made the job of become morphologically aware a
lot easier. Tonie also emphasized morphological knowledge as students read
passages in her class.

For example, Tonie selected the word undisciplined, a word that was important
for comprehension in the Pandora myth her students read and discussed. She
then invited kids to infer the definition of the word based on the meanings of the
parts. An animated conversation ensued as students used both context and word
parts to determine the meaning of the word as it was used in the myth.
Content area teachers have also found that teaching students the meanings of
common word parts can help students learn more. Stephen taught his seventh
graders that the suffix -ism indicates social, political, or religious beliefs or ways
of behaving.
Because of the knowledge of this suffix and other word parts, his students were
excited to predict and discuss the meanings of words
like monotheism, polytheism, and colonialism–important words for the social
studies unit of study.
Strategy 3: Use of Reference Materials
The third word-learning strategy I want to suggest is that of using reference
materials, which is a “beyond-the-word” technique.

Of course we need to teach students to use dictionaries, glossaries, and

thesauruses to verify an inference and check the meaning of a word. But we can
also teach students how to expand vocabulary into semantic networks by finding
synonyms and antonyms in these reference materials as part of their word
exploration.

For example, Susan invited her eighth graders to use a variety of digital sources
to explore selected words. Students were astounded to find numerous
definitions, synonyms, and antonyms for these words in different sources,
leading to a natural discussion of multiple meanings and the context in which the
word was introduced.

Because middle school students often just choose the shortest definition for a
word, this type of investigation emphasized the importance of using multiple
sources and considering the most accurate meaning in the context of the text.

Teaching kids to use word-learning strategies

Effective vocabulary instruction is not a solemn and silent endeavor! Each
teacher I have described above, even though they work with students in very
different schools and in varied subject areas, has discovered that a student-
centered classroom is the key to effective vocabulary teaching and learning.

We want middle school students to be excited about new words and how to
figure them out in text. We want them to become vocabularians, who anticipate
learning new words instead of shutting down when they encounter them.
When students discuss vocabulary knowledge and engage in active vocabulary
exploration, they also learn take an academic risk with words. That’s incredibly
important now and in the future.
References
• Graves, M. (2006). The vocabulary book. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Graves, M. (2007). Vocabulary instruction in the middle grades. Voices in the Middle 15(1): 13-19.
• Moats, L. C. (2000). From speech to print: Language essentials for teachers. Baltimore: Paul H. Brooks
Publishing.

For more ideas, visit MiddleWeb reviews of Word Nerds and Vocabularians.
Dr. Brenda J. Overturf was an award-winning classroom teacher for 18 years in
Kentucky public schools before serving six years as the Jefferson County Public
Schools (Louisville, KY) District Reading Coordinator. In 2005, Overturf joined the
faculty of the University of Louisville to lead the graduate program in Reading
Education. She has been an elected member of the ILA Board of Directors (2009-
2012) and is now a full-time literacy consultant. She is the co-author of Word
Nerds and the new Stenhouse book,Vocabularians.