Which strategy best supports understanding content-area vocabulary that comes from Greek and Latin roots?

• A. Use Context Clues Only
• B. Teach Roots And Affixes To Construct Word Meaning
• C. Guess Word Meaning From First Letter
• D. Skip Unfamiliar Terms

Answer: (B)

Understanding content-area vocabulary that comes from Greek and Latin roots works best when students learn the roots and affixes so they can build word meanings themselves. Many academic terms are made from smaller morphemes, so recognizing roots like bio (life), geo (earth), graph (write), and affixes such as -logy (study of) or -phobia (fear) lets students infer what a new word means. For example, biology = bio + logy means the study of life, geography = geo + graphy describes the earth, and photosynthesis = photo + synthesis involves putting together light. This approach gives students a toolkit to decode unfamiliar terms across science, social studies, and math, making vocabulary more durable and transferable. Practice helps them internalize patterns—build a root map, study word families, and connect morphemes to concepts—so they can read and understand complex terms more independently. Context clues are useful, but they’re less reliable for technical vocabulary; skipping unfamiliar terms misses chances to apply these decoding strategies.