Why Multiple Meaning Words Matter in Speech Therapy

Let's chat about strategies to target multiple meaning words, shall we? Before we dive into the practical strategies you can use in your next session, I want to lay some groundwork. When I started looking into the research almost a decade ago, I was surprised to learn that 50% of English words have multiple meanings.

Many of our students, especially those with language impairments, have difficulty inferring the meanings of those words. And that can really impact vocabulary development in general, but also comprehension, because if we are not able to analyze words and look at context to understand what they mean, then that can really impact our comprehension.

So we will dive into the strategies that we can use from introducing multiple meaning words to working towards generalization. The first thing I want to do is make sure students understand that words can have multiple meanings. We might just start off the discussion and say words can have multiple meanings, like one word can mean different things. The example I always start with is the animal that flies and the wooden stick used to hit a ball in baseball. That would be kind of my initial teaching so that we can wrap our heads around what we're working on.

Then the second step is having students practice identifying the meaning and looking at the context. In my initial teaching, we would've talked about like a bat the animal as well as the baseball bat. And I might give them some sentences. I like to have the pictures and start with really concrete examples and then we can get more complex.

But I first wanna make sure that they're really understanding the concept, so I might give them two sentences, like the bat flew into the cave, and we would look at that sentence and which bat is that talking about? And just having some specific examples and then using images to help.

Because we are building that imagery, that can be a way to get in some errorless learning and help students understand the context. For our third strategy, something we can do while completing that activity is to think out loud and help students build that meta linguistic awareness.

This is easier with concrete examples. we can ask questions like, how did you know which meaning it was, could it mean something else in that sentence, and kind of having some discussion around that.

And they could practice saying I knew it was the animal because bats live in caves, so that could be the example for the sentence we talked about. And if we're doing this as a group activity, this will be a beautiful language, rich activity. Even if not all of the students are working on multiple meaning words, they can be working on syntax, creating sentences, grammar, vocabulary, all of those things, in the context of these activities. So those are our first three strategies. The fourth strategy is to use a graphic organizer. We have lots of graphic organizers built into SLP Now, that help students kinda break down the meaning and give them robust vocabulary practice with these words.

We have blank graphic organizers in our skill pack for multiple meaning words. For our books and articles, we've identified multiple meaning words in the text. For each word, we give three sentences with the target word in it, and then the students find the word, work through the graphic organizer to identify the part of speech, the meaning, and draw a picture to help with imagery. That type of graphic organizer can be really helpful. One of the strategies that has helped my students the most is helping them understand how parts of speech work.

I have a graphic organizer that lists noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and it gives a student friendly definition of what a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb are. It also has some sentence frames that can help them understand what part of speech something is.

A noun is a person placer thing, and the sentence frames are, I have a blank and I see blank. I have a bat. I see a bat. For the example with bat, the animal and the wooden stick, those are both nouns so that strategy wouldn't help us differentiate the meaning.

We can use that to help students generate different definitions for words. They can use that as a strategy to help them understand what the word might mean. If we know it's a noun, that'll help narrow down how we are going to define that word.

And if we know it's a verb and an action. That'll help us narrow down the definition as well. We have a little cheat sheet that students can use. We can have them look at the context of the sentence and then put the word in their own sentence. For example, if we are looking at change, we can say, I have change.

And then that might spark, oh, change. That means like coins of money. And then if the verb is, I am changing, maybe they think, oh, that means putting on new clothes. And so that helps them generate definitions for this word. It helps them practice to think more flexibly because if you ask them what are two meanings for the word change?

They might only think of one and they have a hard time thinking flexibly of what else could change mean? I found that using those sentence frames can be really helpful and throughout the entire process we'll leverage the strategies of using visuals and graphic organizers and pictography or acting things out to help students build that picture in their heads.

Using the cheat sheet for parts of speech can help give them a framework to start thinking more flexibly about what words mean. So those are our strategies for today. If you want to check out the Multiple Meaning Words Skill Pack or any of the activity sheets for picture books, articles, and science experiments, we have lots of activities based on these evidence backed strategies that you can use in your sessions without having to reinvent the wheel.

You can literally just click. Into something as students are walking in the door and be ready to go. I hope these strategies were super helpful and we'll see you in the next one.