Teacher Talk for...

Statements and Questions for Contextualing:

One of the most effective strategies to increase vocabulary comprehension is to use the context that surrounds an unknown word to discover its meaning.  This discovery process transpires through clues contained in the context.

• What do you know about the word from the sentence?
• Describe how you used the word in contest (definition, cause and effect, opposite).
• How does the context help you understand the meaning of the word?
• Show the context that surrounds the unknown word that helped to reveal its meaning.
• What clues are in the sentence that helped you figure out the word?
• What word do you think best completes the sentence?  Why?
• What are words within the sentences that help to support the meaning of _____________?
• What is the word being used to signal that an opposite, contrasting thought is occurring?
• Try to think how you would use this word as a noun or verb?
• What do these two words have in common?
• When you come to a word you don't know, how do you use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word?