Empowering Students With Word‐Learning Strategies: Teach a Child to Fish

This article on word‐learning strategies describes a theory‐ and research‐based set of procedures for teaching students to use word‐learning strategies—word parts, context clues, the dictionary, and a combined strategy—to infer the meanings of unknown words. The article begins with a rationale for teaching word‐learning strategies, particularly to students with vocabularies smaller than those of many students their age. After this, the authors provide a definition of word‐learning strategies, a review of the most relevant research, and a brief description of the effects of the program. Next are descriptions of the curriculum, the instruction, and key aspects of the authors’ approach. The article concludes with a note stressing the importance of following initial instruction on word‐learning strategies with reviews, reminders, and prompts to use them over time and a description of two aspects of the program identified as particularly important by the teachers the authors worked with.