Understanding Vocabulary and Figurative Language - Goal 11

I'm joining a few other terrific bloggers in reading this book by Jennifer Serravallo and sharing our thoughts about the goal and 3 strategies from the book each week!

If you're just joining us now, no worries!  You can catch up quickly by following the links below:

Introduction & Goals 1-4

Goal 5: Understanding Plot & Setting

Goal 6- Thinking About Characters

Goal 7: Understanding Themes and Ideas

Goal 8: Determining Main Topic(s) and Idea(s)

Goal 9: Determining Key Details

Goal 10: Getting the Most From Text Features

Goal 11:Understanding Vocabulary and Figurative Language

Why is this goal important?  

Understanding vocabulary when reading is crucial for reading comprehension.  The research is clear on this and it's important to include instruction on word meaning and vocabulary into our classrooms.

Who needs this strategy:

• students that don't do well on a standardized word assessment
• students that have difficulty determining meanings of unknown words within text
• students that have difficulty finding clues in text for inferring meaning

The author cautions that we are not trying to determine student word knowledge but rather we want to know if they can use the text to infer the meaning of the unknown word. 

 "Multiple Meaning Words"

Who is it for: Levels J-Z+ 

What Genre/Text: any

Skills Used: monitoring for meaning, inferring

This strategy encourages students to think about whether a multiple meaning word is being used when something isn't making sense within the context when reading.  Students are suggested to read before and after.  Think about how it's used and choose a definition that makes sense.

Prompt students to 

• think about how the word is being used 
• think about what meanings you know for the word  
• is there another meaning that would make sense here in the text?

Using an anchor chart like the one below may help to model how to think/list the multiple meanings of a word.

Source

Here's another chart to help work on multiple meanings of words!

Source

 "Infer to Figure it Out"

Who is it for: Levels L-Z+ 

What Genre/Text: any

Skills Used: inferring

This strategy involves getting students to stop when they come to an unknown word and use clues from the text or picture to help you guess the meaning of the word. 

Prompt students by reminding them to stop for unknown words; check the pictures for clues; and to keep reading past the unknown word. 

This anchor chart below shows one way to get students to focus on using different ways of inferring to determine the meaning of words.

Source

I'm stopping here after two strategies today as this post is late. 

I hope you are enjoying this series as much as I am!