Goal-directed Instructional Design Plan - Context Clues: Reading for
Understanding
Author – Jennifer Peraino
1. A problem or a need – there must be a problem of practice or an educational need that
should be addressed during the lesson.
The educational need that will be addressed in this lesson is how to read and understand
vocabulary that is unfamiliar to the reader. It is important for students to have several
ways to attack unfamiliar words when “sounding it out” does not help the reader to gain
meaning of the word, the surrounding sentences, and, ultimately, the passage. The goal of
this lesson is to provide a strategy that allows readers to look for meanings of unfamiliar
words through contextual clues provided in the reading.
2. A real-world performance – how the learning objective fits into a real-world activity or
need.
The real-world need that this lesson fulfils is the need to understand what we read in order
to learn, function, and grow. Every literate person, no matter how literate they are, needs
to have a basic understanding of how to pull information out of text read in order to
understand the meaning of the text. It is especially important to teach younger students to
do this since they will frequently come across words they do not know. Therefore, students
need to have some ability to reasonably determine the meaning of vocabulary through the
surrounding text. At Sylvan, I work with several students that do not have the ability to
read for meaning. The intended outcomes attained by teaching context clues to them are:
1. they do not feel like they have to have the ability to phonetically read every word they
may come across to gain meaning, but can still gain the intended meaning through
contextual clues; and 2. increase their self-efficacy by enabling them to become more
independent readers.
The real-world activity that I would have them do is read an article or premade sentences
online and come up with meanings of several unfamiliar words within the article. The
students then can check the dictionary or use dictionary.com to see how close of a
definition they came up with.
Another way that this is a lesson could be used is by using the websiteswww.englishzone.com/vocab/vic01.html and www.english-zone.com/vocab/vic02.html are used. These are premade
sentences created specifically to find and use contextual clues. These two sites have free excess for
everyone. The two sites target students with a 4th through 5th grade reading level.
3. An instructional objective – the objectives are based on the final outcome, activity or
test. These objectives will each be different for the four types of knowledge; performing
skills, recalling facts, identifying examples of concepts, and applying principles.
a) Students will have the understanding of what contextual clues are.
b) Students will have the ability to identify two main types of context clues: concrete and
inferential.
c) Students will be able to identify contextual clues needed to determine the meaning of
unfamiliar words with at least 80% accuracy within a given text.
d) Students will be able to apply contextual clues to gain a relative meaning of new words.
4. A set of essential content – the basic ideas and skills that will allow the learner to
complete the task or understand the content.
The basic idea that the students should have for this lesson is that we read to gain
understanding. It is important for the Sylvan students to understand that, even though they
might be learning to read, they can also read to learn with the help of contextual clues.
The skills required for this lesson are their ability to read at their assessed reading