Module 2: Activities 1 & 2

word	me	Clockwork orange ch 1
Creech	The sound a bug makes	screech
droogs	Slobber that hangs from a dogs mouth	friends
Glazzies	Chills up your spine	Eyes
goloss	dental floss that has been frayed	Voice
Malenky	that mood when you’re sad and cranky at the same time	Little
Messel	A whole lot of something	feeling
millicents	People who wish harm
poogly	when something is ugly as poop	scared
Razrez	the residue that shaving cream leaves on the skin	tear
Skorry	when you are regretful and scared	Fast
Spatted-	when something is covered in drops of spit	dated
Zoobies	Some kind of animal toy	teeth

I consistently found myself making up definitions by using letter patterns from familiar words. For example, droogs sounds like drool, so to me it is the long strings of slobber that sometimes hang from a dog’s mouth; and creech looks like screech, so I said it is the sound that a bug makes.  I noticed that when defining these words, I was relying on what I know of the English language but also relying heavily on my schema illustrating that the author’s meaning is changed significantly by the reader’s existing schema.

Then, when reading the first chapter of A Clockwork Orange (A. Burgess), I used context to determine the meanings of the unfamiliar words.  Sometimes the clues were given before the unfamiliar word in the sentence, but most often the meaning was revealed after the word in the same sentence and in many cases, after the sentence in the reading passage, sometimes in the same paragraph and sometimes after.  I found that the definitions given varied greatly from those that I had come up with when the words were presented in isolation.  This activity made me realize just how much we rely on context to learn vocabulary.   

When reading the word lists on page 85, I found myself decoding the words by chunking them into syllables; I did not attempt to read them letter by letter.  Sounding out words one letter at a time would be a tremendous waste of time.  The words were much easier to read in chunks and this also helps to recognized familiar letter patterns.  I only read a few of the words all at once, these were the ones that I already knew how to pronounce and they were: sarsaparilla, sycophant, submandibular, plesiosaur, and ingénue.  These are also the words that I am somewhat familiar with the definitions of.  The only word that pronouncing actually gave me insight into the meaning of was plesiosaur and that is because it ends in “osaur,” once I said the word out loud I thought, “Oh yeah, I know that word.” When encountering new words in reading, I usually pause to give a stab at pronunciation, and then quickly read on to see if I’m given any insight into the meaning.  When helping students with new vocabulary, I believe that the very strategies we have used to decipher the new words we’ve encountered would be appropriate to teach to students, such as using context both within and outside the sentence or passage and also chunking words  and using their parts.