Tingo's Vocabulary System:
My main goal in teaching vocabulary is this:
Turn students into philologists. What's a philologist? Glad you asked. While there is an entire field of philology filled with professors wearing tweed jackets with elbow patches, I'm referring to the classical meaning of the word. PHILO-LOG-IST PHIL is a Greek word meaning "love". Think of the words "philanthropist" (a lover of mankind) and "philosophy" (a lover of knowledge). LOG is a Greek word meaning "idea", "word", or (as a suffix) "study". Think of the words "logic" (structural ideas) or biology (the study of living things). IST is a suffix meaning "one who -----". Therefore, a PHILOLOGIST is a person who loves words. |
I say, old chap. Philology is good fun for everyone! |
Here's how.
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1. Teach students how to dissect words on their own.Don't just give students prefixes, roots, and suffixes to memorize. Instead, teach them the thought processes necessary for dissecting a word into its parts.
Probably the best way to do this is to model how you do it, have them practice in pairs, and then have them practice individually. These procedures will correspond with the slideshow on the left.
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2. Include helpful idioms or Latin abbreviations.Even if you're not teaching English language learners, you'd be surprised how many fluent students need to know idioms or latin abbreviations. Don't assume that your students already know what "take it with a grain of salt" means or that they have long discovered the difference between "i.e." and "e.g.". Teach them.
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3. Have your students guess the definition of the words using context clues.Why just give your students the definitions? It's a wasted opportunity for them to develop their skills of using context clues. Instead, give them at least two sample sentences for each word that contain context clues. Have the students work in pairs to infer the definitions. Doing this one by one is too tedious, so jigsaw the activity. (In my example, the definition is grey. When I teach, however, the definitions are blank.)
Also, be sure to explicitly teach idiomatic prepositions or other common ways that words appear in English (see underlining in the example to left). |
4. Teach "academic vocabulary" and other high impact words.Aside from Greek & Latin words, be sure to explicitly teach academic vocabulary and other high impact words. Students see these words in a variety of classes and need to know their exact definitions.
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