The teacher will use the strategy of contextual redefinition to help an ELL student comprehend an excerpt from Animal Farm. The strategy focuses on providing context clues for unfamiliar words to help with word recognition and association. Six unfamiliar words from the excerpt are selected: lurched, scullery, fluttering, ensconced, stout, and benevolent. The student is shown examples of these words used in sentences to understand their meaning in context before reading the passage. After reading, the student defines the words and compares their definitions to the dictionary.

1. Contextual Redefinition
“Aspects of Literacy”

2. Rationale for Contextual
Redefinition Strategy
 To assist my ELL student with comprehending the text
selection from Animal Farm, I will employ the strategy of
contextual redefinition. This strategy is intended to remove
barriers to understanding of the text by focusing on
contextual clues to comprehend unfamiliar vocabulary words.
 This strategy is designed to assist ELL students with word
recognition by providing new and rich contexts for words to
facilitate student's memory of the word and to provide strong
and meaningful associations.

3. Select Unfamiliar Words
 I present six unfamiliar words to be introduced ahead of
my student's reading of the selected passage.
 Lurched
 Scullery
 Fluttering
 Ensconced
 Stout
 Benevolent

4. Show in a Sentence
 I present my ELL student with an example of how these words can
be used in authentic sentences.
 We lurched forward, and then up a steep grade, the tractor’s tires
straining to grip the muddy terrain (Slate, 2014).
 Perhaps this helps explain the rising popularity of the butler’s
pantry, sometimes called a scullery, or secondary kitchen such as
the one Klar has (Forbes, 2014).
 Many have small yellow flags fluttering out front, a sign that the
residents inside — many of whom are elderly — are doing okay
(Washington Post, 2014).

5. Show in a Sentence
 Yet although he was now firmly ensconced in the technology
establishment, there was still something of a revolutionary in
him (Forbes, 2014)
 He was growing very stout, and his voice was hoarse with the
fat that pressed on his throat (The Pearl, 1993).
 The true sage-king was so benevolent that laws and jails
would become unnecessary — the people would willingly
follow his lead (Time, 2014).

6. Show Words in Isolation
 Lurched
 Scullery
 Fluttering
 Ensconced
 Stout
 Benevolent
 I provide these vocabulary words to my student and ask them to provide
definitions for the words based on their exposure to them in the previous
context-rich sentences.
 My student will explain their thinking while they write out a definition for each
word.

7. Predict
 Based on our discussion of these words, I ask my student
to predict what kind of passage has been selected for them
to read. What do they expect the passage to be about?

8. Read
 My student reads the selected passage and takes notes
about their comprehension of the story with special note
to the words we have discussed.
 Most importantly, my student writes down any identifiable
differences between the definition they came up with for
the vocabulary words and the meaning of the word in the
selected passage.

9. Define
 My student looks up the definition of the words from an
available dictionary, and we discuss differences between
their definition and the book definition along with other
possible usages of the words.