Papers by Karen M Wieland
What do you do when you are reading and you come across a word whose meaning you don’t know, yet ... more What do you do when you are reading and you come across a word whose meaning you don’t know, yet you decide that you need to know the word in order to understand what you are reading? You have three choices: (1) you look the unfamiliar word up in a dictionary; (2) you ask someone else what the word means; or (3) you try to figure out the sense of the word on your own. The first solution is not always viable, for a number of reasons. You may not have a dictionary with you while you are reading. Even if you do, the word you seek to define might not be in the dictionary. The dictionary entry may offer multiple meanings, or the sense you are looking for may be new or obscure. Alternatively, the definition of your target word may be so complex that it creates another context, which requires you to look up or figure out the meanings of still more unknown words. For example, a fourth-grader in our center recently used the Mirriam-Webster Online Dictionary to find the meaning of “infract. ”...
Doctoral Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Education State University of New York at Buffalo, 2008
UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dis... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Toward a unified model of contextual vocabulary acquisition. by Wieland, Karen M., Ph ...
Supporting Theory, Research, and Rationale What do you do when you are reading and you come acros... more Supporting Theory, Research, and Rationale What do you do when you are reading and you come across a word whose meaning you don't know, yet you decide that you need to know the word in order to understand what you are reading? You have three choices: (1) you look the unfamiliar word up in a dictionary; (2) you ask someone else what the word means; or (3) you try to figure out the sense of the word on your own. The first solution is not always viable, for a number of reasons. You may not have a dictionary with you while you are reading. Even if you do, the word you seek to define might not be in the dictionary. The dictionary entry may offer multiple meanings, or the sense you are looking for may be new or obscure. Alternatively, the definition of your target word may be so complex that it creates another context, which requires you to look up or figure out the meanings of still more unknown words. For example, a fourth-grader in our center recently used the Mirriam-Webster Online Dictionary to find the meaning of " infract. " The meaning she found was " to infringe " ; not knowing this word, she looked it up, finding the word " encroach " ; again, not knowing this word and becoming perplexed, she looked this word up, finding its definition to be " to enter by stealth " —her teacher then told her the meaning of the word infract. The second solution, asking someone who knows the word's meaning, is easier—provided there is someone nearby to ask—which is not always the case. The knowledgeable person would most likely require contextual information and
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Papers by Karen M Wieland