Help with vocabulary - Decoding versus reading

Painless Reading Comprehension - Darolyn “Lyn” Jones Ed.D. 2016

Help with vocabulary
Decoding versus reading

The word vocabulary refers to the words used in a language and the sum of those words used by a particular person or group within that language. Therefore, understanding those words and the sum of those words is very important to understanding what you are reading. If you don’t know what the words mean, then it’s hard to solve the puzzle. When you are reading, you may feel like you are reading a foreign language because the words look so strange to you.

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Let’s look at how we learn what words mean. Before you went to school, you learned new words by listening to the adults and other kids around you talk. You tried out new words, associated meaning with them, and then learned to put the words into meaningful sentences to form a message. At school, your teachers helped you to build your vocabulary by giving you lists of words, asking you to define them, spell them, and maybe do activities like use the words in sentences. Your teachers also read to you and asked you to read on your own. All of those events, listening, speaking, memorizing, and reading, have helped your vocabulary to grow. There are millions of words out there, and no one expects you to know them all—you just need to know how to figure out what they mean!

Think of a word as a jigsaw puzzle piece. By itself, it has its own color and shape. Just like a word on its own, it has meaning. Think of the word heart. On its own, you might think of the organ beating in your chest, pushing blood through your body. However, once I connect that word to other words, it may take on a different meaning. The same is true with a puzzle. When you snap a puzzle piece into the puzzle, it takes on a different meaning as well and becomes something different than what it started out being. For example,

The firefighters at the scene of the Twin Towers in New York City on 9/11 showed great heart in saving so many lives.

When you snap the word “heart” into place along with other words, it takes on a new meaning. The word “heart” in the sentence isn’t talking about an organ; it’s talking about courage and bravery.

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Connotation and denotation

Words have two identities: connotation and denotation. When you read a word on its own, you think of the dictionary definition—denotation. But, when you read a word in context (connected to other words), it may take on a new meaning—connotation. When I say the word “heart,” we may all agree on a standard definition or its denotation, which is an organ in the body. However, when you reread the sentence

The firefighters at the scene of the Twin Towers in New York City on 9/11 showed great heart in saving so many lives.

we think of a new definition. In fact, when we read words, we naturally think and visualize other meanings based upon our personal experiences. For example, upon hearing the word “heart,” someone might see her grandfather lying in a hospital bed after he had heart surgery. Someone else might see a person he loves. Someone else might see her favorite basketball hero who showed great spirit or heart when he helped his team win the game. In fact, probably not too many of us visualize a body organ.

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That’s part of the problem with vocabulary. When you read something unfamiliar to you, you either don’t know what the words mean or you don’t know what definitions of the words the writer wants you to use. Read the following passage.

Portraitures

Before you begin shooting professional portraitures, you must first take a meter reading. Find out how much light is around and on the subject or subjects you are shooting. Before you set the dials on your camera, decide how much depth of field you want. Do you only want the subject or subjects in the photo to be in focus or do you want what is surrounding the subject to also be in focus? If you only want the human subject or subjects to be in focus (short depth of field), then open your aperture or F stops up (1.4, 2.8, or 5.6) and set your shutter fast (60, 125, or 250). If you want everything to be in focus, then close your aperture down (8.0, 11.0, or 16.0) and set your shutter slow (30 or 15).

Now, you probably figured out that this passage is talking about taking pictures, but unless you are a photographer, you don’t know much else. When you read something and don’t understand it, you feel like an outsider to the topic—a foreigner in a foreign land! And, when you try to figure out what a word means by looking at it on its own, by figuring out its denotation only, you still don’t know what it means. You must do more than that. You need to be an insider to the topic and figure out what the word means on its own and what it means while it is connected or hooked into other words. This may take some time, but it’s well worth the effort.

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Vocabulary strategies

Here are some strategies that can help you figure out the meaning of words. First of all, most writers will give you clues as to what a word means. Let’s look at the jigsaw puzzle again. When you look at an individual puzzle piece, you may have some idea of what part of the overall image that piece represents, but you will not know for certain until you look at the pieces around that piece.

When you see an individual word, you are faced with four possible scenarios:

✵ You have never seen or heard the word before.

✵ You have seen or heard the word before but aren’t sure what it means.

✵ You have seen or heard the word before and know what it means.

✵ You have seen or heard the word before and know several meanings of the word.

The last scenario isn’t a problem that needs solving. The fact is, you know many definitions of most of the words you read. Think about it. When you are reading, you know the majority of the words; usually only a handful of words trip you up. But those few words can be enough to scramble the message the writer is trying to send you. The following problem-solving strategies will help you with the first three scenarios that occur while you are reading.