Reed mentioned the strategy of teaching word parts briefly, prefixes, suffixes, and roots. This is one of the stock lessons that I always keep in place. I show students words that are clearly able to be broken up into parts. For example, the word sociologist has the root socio (Latin for friend) and the suffix -ologist (Greek for speaking, is used for the study of). We discuss how many words are comprised this way. I will pick out a few for us to go over together, but I don't ask them to memorize a list of them. That won't work. It is about the strategy of recognizing that words use the same word parts, so that they can break down an unfamiliar word and relate it to a familiar word.
In order to put a room full of English teachers into a situation where we felt like a student feels when decoding words, she showed us the Russian word институт. I don't know Russian, so when I looked at this word, I tried to sound it out. I had no idea how the first symbol is pronounced, so I though something like ic tin tut. If I related that to a word that I know in English, it isn't a huge stretch to come up with the word institute. In this case, this was the correct guess. Students should be able to think in this way. What does it sound like? What does it look like? Can I make a reasonable guess?
Another problem for students is that they can sound out the words and "read" them, but they don't always know the meaning. One way to break down meaning is to look for patterns. What words are repeated? Are they parts of they same word family? Can meaning be inferred by knowledge of any of the derivations? For example, sociologist could be paired with social, sociology, society, etc. If the student knows any of the words, they can look for relationships. They also would know that this word is important to know.
The British National Corpus has lists of words that are within a word family. She showed us http://www.lextutor.ca/ where you can retrieve these lists. It is also possible to cut and paste a text into the document and this online tool will identify words in word families and highlight it in different colors, as shown below.
Wordle can also be used to look for text frequency, but it does not show words that are related like the lextutor tool does.
In discussing this strategy, Reed made a good point about the difference between content literacy and the reading test. In English class, we teach students to write with variety. The same word should not be repeated over and over. But, in science class, there might not be a similar word. She explained that mass, for example, cannot be equated with weight. Where weight would change with different gravitational pulls, mass would never change. In a science text on mass, then, we would expect the word would be repeated. Other informational text would function the same way.
Names are another stumbling block. Students shouldn't stress out over names. Emile, for example, might be read as Emily instead of Ee-meal, and it would not change the meaning of the overall text. When I read Harry Potter, I had no clue how to pronounce Hermione. I read it as Her mee oh nuh. Instead, it is Her my uh nee. I was off, but it didn't get in the way of my understanding of the text.
In summary, students need to know how to attend to words. First, they should recognize and connect word families. Second, they should look for words that are repeated. Third, they should know how to deal with proper nouns.
Stay tuned for RTI for Adolescents Part III for a discussion of text difficulty.
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