My focus for the balance of this week with my third grade intervention group of students is working with context clues.  Many of these students are not fluent readers.  When they come across unknown words, the strategy used most often is to simply skip over the word, losing the meaning of the text completely.  I have been looking at research and teaching ideas for context clues.

One web site I studied recently is at http://ela.rusdtech.net/Language%20Arts%20Guide/LA%20Guide-Context%20Clues.pdf.  This site discusses the importance of context clues to help struggling readers make meaning of text.  It elaborates on syntactic and semantic clues and how each can help a reader figure out a word and/or its meaning.  Context clues help readers come to a correct pronunciation of a word, determine a meaning for a word, and read more quickly with understanding.

The instructional implications, according to this article, include teachers modeling the use of context clues.  Teachers can use prompts such as "Does that sound right?" and "Does that make sense?" to encourage students to think about word meanings.  Also, teach students to use context clues along with phonics/decoding skills.

My favorite part of this article is the list of question stems to promote the use of context clues by students.

          "You said ____________.  Does that make sense?"

          "You said ____________.   Does that sound right?"

          "It could be ________________, but look at ________________."

          "Can the rest of the sentence help you?"

          "Try that again and think about what would make sense."

          "Try that again and think about what would sound right."

          "How did you know it was _______________?"

          "Try that agan."

It is nice to have some specific things to say to the students as they are attempting to think through and use context clues.  I am having students underline the surrounding words they used as clues to determine meaning of a specific word.  They enjoy being detectives and looking for clues.