3 Word families and word parts In this unit you will:


• build your vocabulary by learning different members of word families • look at common prefixes and suffixes which are used to form different words, e.g., ~al as a suffix to form adjectives like parental, economical, or ~ion as a suffix to form nouns like restriction


• look at some common word parts which will help you identify the meanings of unknown words, e.g., ~port~ as in export, portable, etc.


Introduction


Read these sentences and note the different forms of the word reduce. Study tip


Of all the ideas for improving education, few are as simple or attractive as reducing the number of pupils per teacher.


Class-size reduction has lately developed from a subject of primarily academic interest to a key political issue.


The most obvious drawback to class-size reduction is the huge cost.


The state of California, for example, has been spending more than $1.5 billion annually over the past seven years to reduce class size to 20 or fewer for children in the four- to seven- year-old bracket.


Source: Ehrenberg, R. G., Brewer, D. J., Gamoran, A., & Willms, J. D. (2001, November). Does class size matter? Scientific American, 285(5), 78–85.


As you can see, two different forms of the word reduce are used here: the noun reduction and the verb to reduce. These words are part of the same word family. In these sentences, the different members of the word family are used to connect ideas within the text and make it cohesive. Knowing the different members of word families will give you another way of connecting ideas in your own written texts.


Look at another example of how different members of the same word family can be used to link together ideas and information in a text.


In this text, different members of the word family child are used: child, childhood and children.


As we showed earlier, attitudes towards children were changing, in the upper levels of society at least, by the seventeenth century, but childhood, as people think of it today, did not become clearly established for most of the population until the nineteenth century. Two key changes during this century were the restriction of child labour by the Factory Acts and the development of compulsory education, which was gradually lengthened until the school-leaving age reached 16 in 1972. These changes created a space for childhood between infancy and adulthood and kept children in the parental home for a longer period. Source: Fulcher, J., & Scott, J. (1999). Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Learning vocabulary linked to one topic helps memorization.


Vocabulary


21


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