Podcast Transcript
Sometimes when you read, you find a word whose meaning you do not know. Often you can tell the meaning of the word by the way the word is used in the sentence. This is called understanding word meaning in context. Questions about meaning in context ask you to find the meaning of a word that may not be familiar to you. If you have trouble choosing an answer for a question like this, try each answer choice in the sentence where the word appears in the passage. See which answer choice makes the most sense.
In the previous episode, we focused on the sixth reading strategy – Making Predictions.
This episode of the CARS & STARS Online podcast is about Finding Word Meaning in Context, which is one of the main reading strategies that underpins the CARS & STARS Online reading program.
But what are reading strategies, and why should you know about them?
Those elements that are most important for advanced reading comprehension, such as applying prior knowledge, building an extensive vocabulary, and developing critical-thinking capabilities, are skills that are learned and developed on an ongoing basis over time. They are essential in enabling students to engage in close textual analysis and deep, thoughtful reading comprehension across a range of texts and subject areas.
Comprehension can also be enhanced for many students through a set of specific, targeted strategies. Comprehension strategies are conscious plans, steps that many good readers can use to better make sense of texts, regardless of subject or genre. Comprehension strategies help students become purposeful, active readers that are in control of their own reading comprehension and able to think critically about text in any context.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading program designed to turn every student into a proficient and capable reader, with advanced levels of reading comprehension. The core reading strategies that underpin the entirety of the CARS & STARS Online digital reading comprehension program form an underlying instructional framework that recurs throughout every level and provides consistency of understanding and instruction for students and teachers alike.
The twelve reading strategies progress from simpler, lower-order thinking skills such as Finding the Main Idea and Recalling Facts and Details to more complex, higher-order concepts such as Identifying Author’s Purpose and Summarising. Initial questions determine students’ mastery of the text at a literal level, while later questions build on this understanding to get to the heart of their conceptual understanding. In this way, in every reading passage across every reading level, students are being asked to perform the same essential tasks – with their difficulty and complexity increasing as the student progresses through the reading levels.
These research-proven strategies, taken together, offer a complete recipe for increased student awareness of textual features and concepts, and provide a direct and understandable pathway to improving reading comprehension for every student.
And now, onto our main strategy for this episode: Finding Word Meaning in Context!
The ability to derive meaning from words is the heart of reading comprehension. At the simplest level, students reading text should be aware that they can work out the meaning of unfamiliar words by either looking them up in a dictionary or asking the teacher to define them. In this way, at the beginning levels of comprehension, students are aware that there are definitions and meanings that they do not know but are not cowed by this and can display a willingness to find out about words that they do not know yet.
This relationship to securing definitions is a simple one – the student reads a word, perhaps sounding it out due to its unfamiliarity, but is drawn to resources beyond the text to find out its meaning. In a more advanced level of reading comprehension, a student will display the skill of finding out the meaning of a word themselves by looking at its place in the text and inferring possible meanings from its relation to the rest of the passage.
In this way, Finding Word Meaning in Context is a fundamental skill in the evolution of a student’s comprehension journey, because it illustrates not just a willingness to learn unfamiliar concepts in order to better understand text, but also the realisation that textual relationships within stories presented can be used to engage with text and promote thinking that allows students to use what they know to arrive at what they don’t.
Finding Word Meaning in Context is a crucial skill that develops as students move from lower-order to higher-order thinking about the texts that they read and illustrates the development of comprehension from rote learning to critically and creatively engaging with text read. Where once students were simply aware that definitions could be located outside the text, Finding Word Meaning in Context gradually develops a student’s ability to carefully and informedly find the knowledge of unknown concepts themselves within the text they’re reading.
In this way, Finding Word Meaning in Context is a pivotal strategy among the twelve that form the heart of CARS & STARS Online. Students who master this strategy demonstrate an ability to think deeply about information provided in a text, both directly and indirectly, and draw their own conclusions as to its meaning. Questions about Finding Word Meaning in Context in CARS & STARS Online encourage students to think about several possible meanings for a word and arrive at what they think is the most likely based on the wider context in which it is presented.
Here are some tips for using Finding Word Meaning in Context to make better sense of any text.
Look for context clues in the sentences before, after and in which the unknown word appears.
Look for synonyms and antonyms of the unknown word.
Look for definitions of the unknown word.
Use these clues to come up with a definition for the word.
Now that we’ve talked about what this strategy is and how it works, let’s have a go at using Finding Word Meaning in Context in a passage ourselves: and answering questions the way students do in CARS & STARS Online!
First, I’ll read the text.
Jim’s father looked down at his son’s geography test, which had more red ink on it than a Valentine’s Day card.
“Don’t you realise, Jim,” asked his father, “that geography is an integral part of everyday life?”
“Stuff geography!” said Jim. “I can live without it.”
Much later, lost on the highway and unable to read his road map, Jim thought of this conversation with his father.
“I guess my father was right,” thought Jim. “Geography is important in everyday life.”
The word integral is used in the story. What is the meaning of the word integral?
Is it:
“important”
“wasteful”
“frightening”
or: “unavoidable”
The correct answer here is: “important”
This answer is correct because the last part of the story gives a clue about the meaning of the word: “I guess my father was right,” thought Jim. “Geography is important in everyday life.” Since Jim’s father thought geography was an integral part of everyday life, and Jim later thought that his father was right, you can figure out that this must mean that geography was important.
And which of these gives a clue to the meaning of the word integral?
Is it:
a definition
a synonym
an antonym
or: a comparison
The correct answer here is: a synonym
This answer is correct because the word important in the last sentence is a synonym of integral.
Finding Word Meaning in Context is such an important reading strategy that it features in all eight of the main reading levels of CARS & STARS Online.
Readers who struggle often do so not because of a lack of aptitude but because what they’re being asked to learn just hasn’t engaged them in the right way for them yet. This is especially true of readers who can read fluently but whose comprehension of what they’re reading may lag behind that level of fluency.
Often, when we think of students having trouble with reading, we imagine them struggling to decode letters in a text or to figure out what the words are in a piece of writing. But what about the student who might be able to read beautifully, but who has no ability to decipher what they’ve just read? These students can read, yes, but they have trouble understanding vocabulary and figurative language, as well as other meaning-making skills such as inferencing and being able to logically sequence a text. In short, they might be able to read but they really don’t comprehend.
This type of struggling reader has long existed but is much less noticeable in the classroom than those who have difficulty decoding, because they appear superficially to hit all the markers of a good reader. Often, it’s not until they’re older that problems become obvious, and by then it might be too late. We’re left with older students who sound like they’re reading but understand nothing that they have read.
CARS & STARS Online is uniquely positioned to identify and help this type of reader, being able to give a full and instantly updated picture of a student’s reading comprehension ability across twelve targeted strategies so that teachers can easily see which areas a student might be struggling in, and how to address those struggles. What’s more, the new FOCUS Reading offers intensive, targeted instruction in the six core reading strategies that are most central to higher-order thinking, offering a more complete and focused way of helping these learners in just the areas they’re finding challenging.
CARS & STARS Online is designed with differentiation as a core value. In fact, the program is made to be used with different students on different levels at the same time, matching content to students rather than trying to jam every student peg into the same content hole. For readers who might be fluent but lack comprehension, that means they’ll always be receiving help at their level – and improving where they need to improve.
If you are interested in learning more about the CARS & STARS Online subscriptions and how they can help children to achieve better results, then sign up for a free trial to be an integral part of your child’s reading success.
If you have missed out our previous episode, please click here. The next episode will be focused on the eight reading strategy – Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences.
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See you in the next episode, and thanks for listening!
