Building a powerful vocabulary means more than learning new words. It means leaning new ways to think about words. In this unit you will learn some thinking skills that will help you guess the meaning of unknown words. Then you will learn how to use some functions words to understand what you read.

For enhancing reading comprehension, the key vocabulary items are often no the content words but function words (Cooper, 1984) which serve as cohesion devices, tying the text together and signaling the relationships between concepts and ideas. These function words, an essential component of vocabulary development for skilled reading, include pronouns, synonyms, hyponyms, summary words, and the lexical items which signal the relationship between ideas in a text (i.e., however then, also).