Seeing Words as Chameleons

Words are like chameleons. Just like a chameleon changes color to adapt to its environment, a word sometimes has to change forms to adapt to its context in a sentence. This might seem like a silly analogy, but if you have ever tried to teach students new words and how to use those words in original sentences, this silly analogy might benefit you (and your students).

Here's the scenario...

You introduce a new word to a student (e.g., accelerate); the student dutifully memorizes that word's definition ("move faster"), but then writes an original sentence such as "The car's sudden accelerate caused a fatal accident."

Then, you try to justify to the student why he or she was marked wrong. When you start to offer explanation ("accelerate is a verb, what you needed to use is the noun form..."), watch the students' eyes glaze over at the mention of parts of speech. The student responds out of frustration, "but I know what it means."

Clearly, this student needs to be taught that words are like chameleons. When you change a word's environment, the word may have to adapt to its new context — by changing its form, in this case by adding the suffix "tion."

Milk the analogy further: demonstrate this in color.

Present students with groups of words written or highlighted in different colors (demonstrated here using the color-coding key of the Visual Thesaurus): nouns in red, verbs in green, adjectives in yellow, like so?

Then, give students (either individually or in pairs) the following challenge:

Begin with one set of words (either nouns, verbs, or adjectives) and try using those words in original sentences that call for different forms of the words (i.e., parts of speech). Use a different color of marker or highlighter to reflect the words' change in status. For example: if a student starts with a yellow adjective such as happy, hand that student a red noun marker and challenge him to come up with a sentence that calls for the noun form of happy such as "Happiness is a warm blanket." Another example: if a student starts with a green verb such as read, challenge her with a yellow highlighter to come up with a sentence that calls for an adjective form of read such as "Today my reading buddy was Fred."

Once students accept the ever-morphing nature of words and become more familiar with which suffixes are associated with particular parts of speech, they may begin to see the connection between words and their reptilian cousins.

Note: Since asking students to adapt words in multiple contexts can be especially challenging to struggling readers or to the ELL population, allow them to use a dictionary as an aid. In addition, you may want to supply students with a list of suffixes that usually indicate parts of speech (such as this one). And here is a BBC Learning English "quiznet" exercise that gives students practice choosing the correct suffixes for different sentences.