Building vocabulary
Students cannot fully comprehend text if they do not know the meaning of key words and do not have the skills to figure out a probable fit.
It is simply not possible to directly teach all the vocabulary students should absorb. Vocabulary instruction should focus on three areas:
- Building an interest in and fascination with words and their power.
- Teaching the strategies involved in figuring out probable meanings of words in the process of reading. This involves the inside strategies around the morphological makeup of the word, and the outside strategies relating to context.
- Directly teaching important function words.
The comprehension scripts accompanying the books teach students basic strategies for figuring out unfamiliar words and phrases. The writing component of this programme builds on this, placing a heavy emphasis on vocabulary building. A PDF explaining how to do this accompanies the resource.
There are now multiple free online resources that help, including:
- The online thesaurus thesaurus.com
- Learner’s dictionaries, which give definitions in everyday language, usually with a range of examples. These two are both free:
www.britannica.com>dictionary
http://www.dictionary.cambridge org
These dictionaries usually include the pronunciation of the word. The howjsay website is an excellent free pronunciation guide, giving both standard British and American accents. This too is free.