About this activity
Eight roots shown in three forms with their word classes: depend, dependent, dependence; analyze, analysis, analytical; govern, government, governmental; compete, competition, competitive; persuade, persuasion, persuasive; conclude, conclusion, conclusive. Same root, three jobs in a sentence — which is what a rubric asking for varied sentence structure is actually requiring.
How to use it in a session
Build a sentence with each form of the same root. The government governs, its governmental policy — three sentences on one root shows what the word class change is for. Analyze and analysis are the most useful pair here, since both appear in every rubric the student will meet. Fifteen minutes covers three or four roots with sentences.
What to listen for
Listen for the stress shifts, which are substantial in this set. Analyze and analysis put the stress in different places, as do compete and competition, and a student with the morphology and not the phonology sounds wrong while being right. Watch conclude and conclusion, where the base changes its final sound as well as its ending.
Carrying it home
When a new academic word appears in reading, asking what other forms it has takes ten seconds and turns one word into three. Analysis gives analyze and analytical, and a student who gets into the habit builds vocabulary without anyone teaching it.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- Seventh through twelfth, where academic vocabulary arrives in families rather than as single words.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all eight roots play with no account.
- Why does the part of speech matter?
- Because it decides where the word can go in a sentence. A student who knows only the verb form of a root cannot write the noun-subject sentences that academic writing is built on.