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.
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