Pattern-Building When Learning a New Word
Words are fundamentally conceptual—although they are physical objects, they represent something ideational. Just giving students definitions of words or having them evaluate the context of word use does not fully use the brain’s patterning style of identifying information. Th e value of word pattern sorting extends beyond their defi nition to relating words to the pattern of categorization where they fi t. Students attend to how words relate to other words through a number of types of categories such as similar meaning, shared classifi cation category, semantic grouping, root similarities, and word beginnings and endings.
After discussing a word like “metamorphosis,” students can use graphic organizers to place the word in multiple categories and to add other words to each category.
- Words endings: other words ending in “sis” such as photosynthesis, analysis, phagocytosis, and mitosis.
- Words with similar meanings: change, transformation, and alteration.
- Words with similar roots: morph, morphology, amorphous, and morpheme.
- Words with similar prefi xes: metaphor, metaphysical, and metacognition.
Notes:
Folksonomies: teaching literacy reading
Taxonomies:
/science/medicine/genetics (0.355695)
/hobbies and interests/arts and crafts/crochet (0.336875)
/art and entertainment/books and literature (0.311162)
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Concepts:
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Greek loanwords (0.902032): dbpedia
Word (0.853126): dbpedia | freebase
Morpheme (0.797001): dbpedia | freebase
Inflection (0.688926): dbpedia | freebase
Language (0.666826): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Category theory (0.626720): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Linguistics (0.625729): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Metaphysics (0.615749): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Ontology (0.614392): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Categories (0.570499): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Chinese language (0.564803): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
Grammatical number (0.525746): dbpedia | freebase
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Concepts in metaphysics (0.508315): dbpedia
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Meaning of life (0.493613): dbpedia | freebase | yago
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Meaning (0.448150): dbpedia
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Definition (0.436836): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Root (0.435802): opencyc
Teaching the Brain to Read: Strategies for Improving Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension