Weekly ELD Strategy #6

I was talking with a 6th grade science teacher, who said her students were really struggling to comprehend the vocabulary of a particular unit. She said they were learning about mollusks, and I said, "You know mollusk is a Spanish and Portuguese cognate, right?"

A what?

A cognate is a word that shares a similar meaning, spelling, and pronunciation in two or more languages. Since Spanish and Portuguese are both Romance languages, they have many, many cognates, and many English words are cognates with Spanish and Portuguese. In fact, 30-40% of all words in English have a related word in Spanish, and this cognate awareness can really help ELs understand their second language. 

Strategy 6: Teaching Cognates 

Unless you are fluent in Spanish or Portuguese, how can you teach cognates to your students? Colorin Colorado has a few good ideas. 

• Create a class chart or word wall or digital cognate thesaurus as a reference and repository for any cognates you or your students find during a lesson or unit
• When reading aloud, ask ELs to point out when they think they hear a cognate. Stop reading and discuss that cognate, and then add those words to your class list
• When students are reading texts in their content classes, encourage them to write on a sticky note any cognate they see. These words could also be added to the chart.
• Reinforce cognates you have already discussed by having ELs do a word sort.
• Have students circle the differences between the cognates by identifying which letters are different. This also helps students bridge new vocabulary in one or both languages to their background knowledge in L1

Note: Beware of False Cognates!

Not all words that sound similar in Spanish/Portuguese and English actually have the same meaning. (Example embarazada does not mean embarrassed, it means pregnant!) This, however, is also a teachable moment. (See 20 False Cognates that Can Get You in Trouble)

Click here for a list of 1001 English-Spanish Cognates

For more information, check out Using Cognates to Develop Comprehension in English

**As always, all of the ELD Weekly Strategies can be found here, for your reference. If you have any questions about this ELD strategy or any other strategy, please let me know.