English Essentials: Vocabulary Acquisition & Use

Last week, we started working on our learning targets for Vocabulary Acquisition and Use, really, just a fancy way of saying, "learning new vocabulary words while reading."

One of my (Dr. B's) favorite things about reading is learning new words.  I'm not kidding. Nothing gets me more excited than coming across a word I don't know, circling it, and trying to figure out its meaning. If I could take you all back in time, I would show you fifteen-year-old Dr. Brigman's bookmarks from the ninth grade. Every one of them was covered in new words and their definitions. Back then, I thought having a strong vocabulary meant memorizing tons and tons of new words and their definitions.

Silly Brigman.

Now, I know that learning new vocabulary is actually based on a pretty important skill: your ability to figure out what a word means based on what it is doing in a sentence.  Sure, the definition will always be important, but it's only one part of a puzzle when acquiring new vocabulary.

Here's how it works:

Step 1
First, you take a sentence with a word you don't know.  I'm going to pick a sentence from page 109 from Becoming Nicole.

"The use of public bathrooms is fraught with controversy and anxiety when it comes to transgender people who prefer to use the restroom of their gender with which they identify."

Step 2

Second, you figure out what the word is saying based on context clues (how the word is being used in the sentence).  Since I am very familiar with the issue of using public bathrooms, I can guess that the word "fraught" means "filled with" because it is followed by the phrase, "with controversy and anxiety."

Step 3

Now, I'm going to look the word fraught up in the dictionary.  According to the dictionary at my desk, fraught means, "filled with or destined to result in." 

Step 4

Finally, I'm going to take this textbook definition and apply it back to my original sentence, summarizing what the word means now that I've looked it up.  My summary would be: "The issue of using public bathrooms is filled with (fraught with) all sorts of problems for transgender people such as fear or anxiety. Oftentimes, this leads to lots of public debates around this issue." 

Make sense?

First, I identified a word I didn't know and made an educated guess about its meaning. Then, I looked up the definition and applied it to the original sentence, summarizing the sentence's meaning in my own words. 

In the comments section below, post steps 1-4 for a word you do not know.