Vocabulary Words for the Week of March 23

Word Consciousness: Word consciousness is “awareness and interest in words and their meaning” (Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2008).  
(https://keystoliteracy.com/blog/word-conscious-classroom/)

Word consciousness is important because it is a great trait for students (and teachers) to have. If teachers encourage a sense of word consciousness within their students, then their students will be much more open to learning new words and expanding their vocabulary (which are great mentalities to have when becoming a successful literate person).



Diphthongs: A diphthong is a sound made by combining two vowels, specifically when it starts as one vowel sound and goes to another, like the oy sound in oil.
(https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/diphthong)

Diphthongs are important because they are unique and potentially confusing and impossible to decipher unless taught. If a student is taught multiple diphthongs, then they'll be able to read more words and have a better chance at correctly decoding an unknown word that contains a diphthongs they've seen before.



Ambiguous Vowels: – A vowel sound represented by a variety of different spelling patterns, or vowel patterns that represent a variety of sounds.
(http://ww3.mamkschools.org/ela/Documents/WTWLevelCContent.pdf)

Ambiguous vowels are important because developing readers need to be made aware of these patterns and all the spelling variations that a single sound can make, or vice versa. This is a tool that, once learned, can be used to decode unknown words.



Homophones: Words that sounds the same but are spelled differently.

Homophones are important because they can be very confusing to students, especially those in the within-word patter developmental writing stage. Homophones are examples of how different letter and letter combinations can create replicate sounds and why we need to be aware of the power of digraphs, diphthongs, ambiguous vowels, and other phonetic devises so that we are not fooled.



Homographs: Words that are written the same but have a different meaning and/or pronuncuation.

Homographs are important because they can be confusing to students who are unaware that letters and letter combinations can have a variety of different sounds. Students need to be taught why these words sound differently (the origin/history of the word) so that they can not be fooled in the future.




Homonyms: Words that have the same spelling and typically the same pronunciation, but have different meanings.

Homonyms are important because they can be very confusing and further prove how necessary it is to be aware of phonetic patterns. They also are an example of how the context of a word and how the word is used in a sentence can completely change the meaning of the word and why awareness of the story/text is incredibly important.