Vocabulary in context

General

Students learn to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words by using clues in context.

Standards

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.8.4a

Learning objective

Students will be able to use the context of a sentence or paragraph to determine the meaning of unknown words or phrases.

Introduction

As a class, discuss what strategies students already know that can be used to determine the meaning of unknown words and phrases. Discuss two strategies that should already be familiar to students, namely the use of prefixes, suffixes and root words as well as the use of synonyms and antonyms. Remind students what prefixes, suffixes, and root words are by dragging the parts of the word 'disagreement' to their correct box and defining each part. Then discuss synonyms and antonyms and brainstorm some synonyms and antonyms for the word "beautiful."

Instruction

Tell students that when strategies like prefix, suffix, root or synonym, and antonym don't help, context is your friend. Define the word context and explain that by looking at context, you investigate what's going on in the rest of the surrounding text. As a class, read the text and determine what the context of the situation is. Who is it, what or where. Then practice again, but instead of only determining the context, use that to help define the word in bold. Then explain to students that certain words and phrases can signal that an unknown word is a synonym or antonym of a familiar word, and teach students what some of these words are. As a class, read the given texts and see if you can determine the meaning of the given word by defining what its synonym/antonym is. Challenge students to write a paragraph with a word that their classmates might not know and to give context clues in the form of a synonym or antonym. Have students share with their partner/group and see if they can determine the meaning of the unknown word. Then as a class, practice defining a word with the given sentences.

Quiz

Students are given true/false questions that check their knowledge of key concepts in the text and then are given multiple-choice questions in which they must identify the meaning of the bold word in a given sentence.

Closing

Remind students that they can now determine the meaning of an unknown word or phrase by using the overall meaning of a sentence or paragraph. Discuss ways in which to do this and discuss why it is important to be able to determine the meaning of unknown words and phrases. Close with a challenge in which students form pairs. Each pair gets a dictionary and they must find a random word which they use in a paragraph. They must be sure to give context with which their partner should be able to determine the meaning of the word. When they are done writing a paragraph, they swap and their partner must try to determine the meaning of the word.