Teaching English Vocabulary from Latin Roots in the ESL classroom

The following material has been developed for classroom use with an advanced (400+ TOEFL) ESL class. The material is based on five Latin roots, nineteen prefixes, and several suffixes, resulting in seventy-seven derivatives. The primary goal of this project is not to teach these specific seventy-seven vocabulary items but to provide the student, through his work with these seventy-seven words, vocabulary acqusition and discernment skills. The order of the exercises is based on the concept of moving from the known to the unknown. The definition exercise asks the student to compose a short definition based on his knowledge of Latin roots and affixes in combinantion with context clues given in the sentences. The crossword puzzle works in the reverse: the student is given a short definition and is asked to supply the appropriate word. The card game is the turning point of the five exercises. It focuses more on the morphological aspects of the words: the combining of roots and affixes. The morphological chart goes a step further than the card game, still concentrating on the morphology of the words, asking the student to construct different parts of speech of a given word. The completion exercise combines all the aspects of the former exercises, asking the student to fill in a blank using the correct word (correct part of speech, etc.) as determined by the context of the sentence within the story