Classifying

      Classification activities help students group like terms or concepts into categories. For example, an ELA teacher asks her students to classify the following terms based on their characteristics: adage, fore-shadowing, hyperbole, idiom, metaphor, personification, proverb, simile, stanza, tone, and verse. While the teacher could ask students to create their own categories, she decides to provide categories such as Figurative Language, Structural Features, and Literary Techniques. One student sorts the words as follows.

      Figurative Language: hyperbole, idiom, metaphor, personification, simile

      Structural Features: stanza, verse

      Literary Techniques: adage, foreshadowing, proverb, tone

      Classification activities can fall anywhere on a continuum from structured to open-ended. If the teacher provides both the words to sort and the categories, then the task is fairly structured. If the teacher provides only the words, the task will be more open-ended. The most open-ended version of a classification activity would involve students identifying both the words to sort and the categories in which to sort them. For example, a high-school math teacher whose students have been studying functions might ask students to look at all the words they had recorded in their vocabulary notebooks, select the ones they thought were most important for the study of functions, and create a classification scheme for those words. This exercise could allow students to think about words in new ways. A student might select the math words he thought most directly applied to functions and then flip to the ELA or cognitive verbs section of his notebook and identify words from those subject areas (such as relationship or derive) as well. Including those words would influence the student’s choices about which classification categories were most appropriate. Whether structured or open-ended, the key to successful classification activities is prompting students to group words into categories.

       Creating Metaphors

      Creating metaphors involves identifying similarities and connections between words at a figurative, abstract, or nonliteral level. For example, the phrase “he is the light of my life” uses a metaphor to describe one who is beloved. While people often associate light with joy, happiness, and security, a person cannot literally be luminescent. Consider a fifth-grade math teacher who asks her students to create metaphors using the term common denominator. One student says, “Common denominators are the dating websites of math,” and explains that in the same way that common denominators make it easier to add fractions, dating websites make it easier for couples to pair up. Students should not only create metaphors but also explain why they grouped the two terms together. To prompt and facilitate this explanation, a teacher might use the following sentence stem:

      _________ is/are _________ because _________.

      For more complex metaphors, students can fill in a matrix. First, they identify specific characteristics of a term in the left column; then they state those characteristics more generally in the center column. In the right column, students look for a different term that also fits with the general characteristics described in the center column. For example, a student wants to create a metaphor using source. He completes the left and center columns of the matrix as shown in table 2.5. Then, he looks for a term that could be equated with source at an abstract level. The student decides to use the term character as the second term in the metaphor and fills in the right column of the matrix to explain his reasoning.

Table 2.5: Metaphor Matrix for Source

      After completing a matrix like the one in table 2.5, the student decides to phrase his metaphor as follows: Characters are the sources of stories. To explain the abstract relationship, the student uses the general descriptions listed in his matrix.

      Because metaphor activities ask students to examine the abstract or nonliteral elements of a term, they are an excellent way to help students deepen their vocabulary knowledge about words they know at a surface level.

       Creating Analogies

      To create an analogy, students must identify and describe a relationship between two items or concepts. For example, “Betty is to Jeff as oil is to water” implies that in the same way that oil repels water, Betty repels Jeff. This sort of analysis requires in-depth examination of the nuances of relationships between terms. There are several ways in which a teacher can prompt students to generate analogies. For example, an ELA teacher could provide the first term of each analogy pair and ask students to fill in the second term in each pair, as follows:

      An adjective is to a _________ as an adverb is to a _________.

      A student responds by saying, “An adjective is to a noun as an adverb is to a verb.” He might extend his answer by explaining that adjectival phrase and adverbial phrase could be substituted for adjective and adverb in the analogy.

      Alternatively, the teacher could provide both terms in the first pair and ask students to create the second pair, as follows:

      Prefix is to suffix as _________ is to _________.

      A student responds by saying, “Prefix is to suffix as first names are to last names because first names come at the beginning of your full name and last names come at the end of your full name.” She then extends it by comparing a root word to a person’s middle name.

      Another useful strategy is to ask students to label the relationship between two sets of terms. Visual analogy diagrams are useful for this purpose, as shown in figure 2.6.

Figure 2.6: Visual analogy diagram.

      In figure 2.6, the student labeled the relationship described by the analogy “an adjective is to a noun as an adverb is to a verb” as descriptive. Another student might label the same relationship modifying or adding information.

      Examining Affixes and Root Words

      Understanding word parts and how words are constructed has been shown to have a correlation of 0.83 with vocabulary knowledge (Nagy, Berninger, Abbott, Vaughan, & Vermeulen, 2003). As explained in chapter 1, correlations that are close to 1.00 indicate strong relationships between two variables. So, as students’ understanding of word parts and word construction increases, so does their vocabulary knowledge. Some (Adams, 1990) have cautioned against teaching word parts to students learning to read, because the segmentation of a word into syllables does not always match the segmentation of a word into word parts. For example, a student learning to read would probably try to segment the word information into syllables (in-for-ma-tion) to decode it. However, its morphological segmentation is different (in-form-ation), and this difference could be confusing to an immature reader. For confident readers who have reached a level of automaticity with decoding longer words, however, understanding roots and affixes can help them remember words they have learned and figure out the meaning of unfamiliar terms. Stahl (2005) explained,

      A discussion of word parts should become an integral part of word-learning instruction. Discussions that include stories about word origins and derivations can stir interest in learning more about language—that is, build word consciousness. Stories that help children to see and understand how similarities in word spellings may show similarities

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