Academic Vocabulary Tip: Teach All the Forms of a Word

In writing unit or lesson plans, consider how you’re introducing academic vocabulary. When students learn words in isolation, they are apt to only be able to use the forms of the word they have memorized. When you’re teaching academic vocabulary, think about teaching the word AND all its forms. That will help students learn how to use the word effectively, whether for writing, reading, or speaking.

Here’s a sample lesson, teaching the word EROSION. We can imagine that the Essential Question might be, “How can erosion have a lasting impact on beach-side communities?” After defining erosion visually, with pictures and/or video, you would most likely call on someone to say “Tell me what erosion means, in your own words.” After learning the noun form of erosion, students should be able to say, “erosion is when wind or water takes away sand or rock.” Most likely, your next question would be “Who has seen erosion on a beach or mountain before?” You’ve asked students to think of erosion in the past tense. It’s quite possible that some students may be able to use their grammatical infrastructure to take the noun and conjugate it into a verb, but there will be many who say, “At the beach, the sand was erosioning and it made a big slide!” Or, “When we were on a hike, some rocks erosioned and fell down the mountain.” Both are excellent uses of the word in context- students have demonstrated understanding of the content. We know that students know what erosion is. But, they haven’t learned how to use the word in all its forms. That’s where the linguistic skill comes in.

In the image below, students are exposed to the meaning of the word erosion, as well as many forms of the word in the context of a paragraph.

Showing students that we can use erode, eroding and, eroded, to talk about erosion expands their sentence-building capabilities. Students can use this paragraph as comprehension practice, a cloze passage, or a model to answer the EQ of the lesson. We are offering students content AND skill: the meaning and the usage. I encourage you to take the extra step in vocabulary instruction and teach all the forms of a word!