TEKS Talk - SLA Vocabulary image

Knowledge and Skills Statement

Developing and sustaining foundational language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking--vocabulary. The student uses newly acquired vocabulary expressively.

Ask students to use their dictionaries to look up homophones, homographs, and commonly confused terms. Then instruct students to write sentences with each of the words and share them in small groups.
 

Further Explanation

Students are expected to distinguish and correctly use words that are pronounced the same but differ in spelling and meaning (homophones), words that have the same written form but a different meaning (homographs), and terms that are commonly confused because of their similar spelling.

Students are expected to understand the difference among commonly confused terms such as por qué, porqué, por que, and porque, whose subtle differences in spelling and pronunciation make them difficult to identify without context. Consider the following examples: ¿Por qué no vendrás al día de campo? Porque según mis padres debo terminar mi proyecto mañana. No sé la razón por que el autobús no pasó esta mañana. Me gustaría saber el porqué de esa situación.
Students are expected to distinguish and correctly use words that have the same written form, but a different meaning (homographs), such as copa (crown of a hat), copa (upper part of a tree), and copa (type of drinking glass).
Students should distinguish and correctly use words that are pronounced the same but differ in spelling and meaning (homophones), as aprender (to learn) and aprehender (to grasp the meaning of something) or savia (sap) and sabia (wise lady).