Vocabulary Clarify Meaning

A sixth-grade student encounters the following sentence in a short story.

"She experienced a sense of déja vu as she walked down the street of the strange new city."

The student asks the teacher about the meaning of déja vu in the sentence. The teacher could best respond by advising the student to take which of the following steps?

• Make note of the word in a vocabulary log, and then study the word after finishing the story.

• Use context clues in the sentence to guess the meaning of the word, and then try out that meaning in the sentence.

• Look up the word in the dictionary, and then paraphrase the sentence using the dictionary definition.

• Break the word into its component parts, and then compare the parts to the meanings of similar known words.

Before beginning a new content-area reading passage, a fourth-grade teacher asks students to think of words related to the topic of the text. The teacher writes the words on the board and then asks the students to suggest ways to group the words based on meaningful connections. The teacher also encourages them to explain their reasons for grouping particular words together. This series of activities is likely to promote the students' reading development primarily by helping them:

• extend and reinforce their expressive and receptive vocabularies related to the text's topic.

• infer the meaning of new vocabulary in the text based on word derivations.

• strengthen and extend their understanding of the overall structure of the text.

• verify word meanings in the text by incorporating syntactic and semantic clues into their word analysis.

A first-grade teacher designs the following activity.

1. Divide students into pairs.

2. Have students sit back-to-back.

3. Give one student in each pair a picture of a familiar object to

describe to his or her partner.

4. The partner tries to name the object based on the description.

This activity is likely to contribute to students' literacy development primarily by:

• helping them begin to make connection between print and the spoken word.

• fostering their ability to work independently of teacher guidance.

• promoting their oral language development and listening comprehension.

• encouraging them to practice speaking skills.

A fifth-grade student reads the sentence, "After playing with her friends all day, Kaylee did her science homework, her geography project, and her composition in one fell swoop." The student asks the teacher for help understanding what is meant by the phrase one fell swoop. The teacher can best help the student understand this idiomatic expression by:

• discussing with the student more examples of the phrase used in context.

• directing the student to look up different meanings of fell and swoop in the dictionary.

• helping the student create a tree diagram of the structure of the phrase.

• asking the student to find other sentences in the text that use the words fell and swoop.

A second-grade student demonstrates automaticity decoding grade-level regular and irregular words. However, the student frequently experiences poor text comprehension. Which of the following is the first step the teacher should take in order to promote this student's reading proficiency?

• evaluating the student's ability to apply grade-level phonics skills

• determining the rate of the student's phonological processing

• evaluating the degree to which the student uses syntactic clues

• determining the extent of the student's vocabulary knowledge

A fifth-grade teacher is about to begin a new unit on weather and climate.

Which of the following types of vocabulary words from the unit would be most appropriate for the teacher to pre-teach?

• words that are conceptually challenging

• high-frequency, phonetically irregular words

• multi-syllable words

• high-frequency words with multiple meanings

A text includes the word indefensible, which is unfamiliar to some students in a fourth- grade class. Which of the following strategies for teaching the word would be most effective in both clarifying the meaning of the word and extending the students' vocabulary development?

• Have the students enter the word in their ongoing list of new vocabulary words and then look up its definition independently.

• Use explicit explanation to describe the meaning of the word to the students before they read the text.

• Help the students apply structural and contextual analyses to construct and confirm the word's meaning.

• Ask the students to paraphrase the sentence that contains the word by substituting a synonym for the word.

In which of the following sentences is context most helpful in understanding the italicized word?

• Tulip trees are ubiquitous in Virginia and in some other parts of the United States as well.

• John's friends surreptitiously planned a housewarming party for him soon after he had moved in.

• Mary is magnanimous in all of her dealings with people, even when she does not know a person well.

• Peter's mother was adamant that he should attend college, but his father did not seem to care.

Students in a third-grade class are studying different forms of transportation that are used around the world. As part of this unit of study, they work together to create a semantic map of words associated with transportation, including words that they have recently learned (e.g., barge, rickshaw). This activity is most likely to promote students' vocabulary development by:

• showing them how structural analysis can be used to determine the meaning of new vocabulary.

• helping them to categorize, visualize, and remember new vocabulary.

• guiding them to discover the multiple meanings of new vocabulary.

• providing them with frequent, varied reading experiences using the new vocabulary.