Independent Word Learning

From Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners

What should I use it for?

• Helping students independently figure out the meanings of unknown words

What does it look like?

Explicitly teach and model one or more of the following strategies. Students will need repeated exposure and guided practice before they are able to tackle this independently.

Context clues

Help students derive workable definitions of words using the surrounding text that they understand.

A general strategy for teaching students how to determine a word’s meaning from the context in which it is used is for students to read the sentence that contains the unknown word and determine whether the sentence includes any information that will help them define the word. If not, students can then read the sentences before and after the sentence with the unknown word, looking for information that will help them figure out the word’s meaning.

Model each step using a think-aloud that makes the thinking process public. For example, when teaching the word environment, think aloud by explaining how the sentences around the word environment help determine the word’s meaning.

Provide guided practice before asking students to implement the strategy independently. During guided practice, ask students to think aloud by explaining how the context helped them to figure out the word’s meaning.

Word parts

Another way in which students can determine an unknown word’s meaning, by focusing on prefixes, suffixes, and root words to find familiar patterns in unfamiliar words. Teach students how to use word parts to ascertain a word’s meaning by having them look for the root word and determine whether they know its meaning. Using word parts can also be combined with using context clues, in that good readers first use word parts to make a prediction about a word’s meaning and then use context to confirm that prediction. See below in the sample text for an example. Note how the teacher thinks aloud as she models the task to her students.

Plan learning tasks that provide students with opportunities to apply and review what they are learning. For instance, to provide more practice in using a word’s various morphological forms, have students revise sentences from the original text by including a different form of the root word. Seethe sample for an example of how students rewrote sentences from the zoo passage using another form of the root word, without altering the sentences’ meanings.

Sample Lesson: Using word parts to understand word meaning

Cognates*

*For multilingual learners

Words in two or more languages that share a common origin. These words may help English learners link English words to their primary languages. For example, in Spanish, electricidad means electricity and organismo means organism. The similarities are apparent, but it is useful to show students how they can determine an unknown word’s meaning by looking for similarities between the unknown word and parts of the word or the whole word in their primary language. Over time, identifying these similarities may help students understand unknown words’ meanings on their own. Be aware, though, that for a cognate to be useful, students will need to have encountered the word in their primary language and know what it means.

There are also false cognates, or words that look similar in two languages but have different meanings; students should learn how to determine when the apparent similarity is deceptive. For example, the Spanish words embarazada and fábrica may be mistaken as cognates for the English words embarrassed and fabric. However, the English translation of embarazada is pregnant, while that of fábrica is factory. Therefore, if the set of words being taught includes cognates, be sure to prepare ahead of time to determine whether or not those cognates are false cognates. It can be helpful to have students review the false cognate in the context of the sentence or paragraph it occurs in so that they can see why the false-cognate definition does not fit. It is important to let students know that they may need to use more than one strategy to figure out a word’s meaning, or that using several strategies may help them to better understand the word’s use. For example, if students cannot determine a word’s meaning using context clues, they can try by analyzing the parts of the word. At other times, they might have to use a combination of strategies to determine a word’s meaning. For example, in the sample text on zoos, the meaning of the word overhead can be determined using both word parts and context clues. Here, both the word parts (over and head) and the context (a word that describes ropes that orangutans can use to travel) are useful for inferring the word’s meaning.