The word she is more complex than it seems – why high frequency words deserve more attention
I was recently listening to *linguist Maryellen MacDonald talk about the importance of understanding sentence comprehension. It reminded me just how much we can’t really know what a word means just by looking at it on its own. That’s why working with words in full, meaningful sentences is so powerful, even when the words seem simple.
Let’s take the word she. Easy to learn to spell, so teachers often don’t give it much thought and certainly don’t put it in a tricky word list. But pronouns are hard for kids. They have to learn to find the antecedent, the noun that the pronoun refers to, eg. “My friend Sally loves painting. She is coming to my house later.”
Real-World Uses of she: More Than Just a Personal Pronoun
The complexity increases with how we use this word throughout our language. Someone says, “She’s beautiful.” when they are looking at a boat, or in Aussie/NZ slang, “She’ll be right,” meaning everything will be fine. Suddenly, she isn’t just referring to a person, it’s standing in for something else.
I’m reminded of a cute old ad from New Zealand: little boys pretending to be adults doing DIY. One of them, needing to build a retaining wall, says, “She’s a pretty big job.” Take a look as it’s hilarious, classic Kiwi-Aussie banter, but it’s also a great example of how she can be used in ways that don’t match textbook definitions. (30 seconds – make sure you have the Closed Caption subtitles on)
Why High-Frequency Words are hard for learners – especially multilingual ones
For multilingual learners, this kind of usage can be difficult. Even if they “know” a word like she, that doesn’t mean they understand all the ways it’s used. That’s why it’s so important to keep putting high-frequency words into real phrases and sentences, into conversations and stories that show how they actually perform.
High-frequency words are often function words, the glue of the sentence, not big, content-heavy nouns or verbs. On their own, they might not seem meaningful. But in context? That’s where they come to life.
And when we share the story of a word, like how she comes from the Old English hēo, and how that links to her and hers, we give learners tools to understand these quirks and patterns. It’s confusing at first. Why doesn’t she look like hers? But once students see the history, it starts to make sense. Patterns appear. Confidence grows.
So for a tiny word she is actually a pretty big word! And let’s not even get started on how the word pretty is not only used to refer to the physical attractiveness of people or things but also as an amount signifying ‘to a considerable extent’, that is, ‘lots but not quite as much as very’!
Four Key Tips for Strengthening Vocabulary and Usage
- you can’t build students’ vocabulary by studying words in isolation – context is everything
- be wary of giving one definition of a word – even function words can be used in multiple ways
- try putting words in phrases and sentences so students can see how our language really works
- help students to make connections between words: through grammar connections, meaning connections, and graphemic or phonemic connections
*By the way, if you haven’t listened to this presentation I think you’ll find it well worth your time. Eyes on Reading: What’s Next in the Science of Reading? with Mark Seidenberg and Maryellen MacDonald – YouTube (100 minutes)
Teaching Pronouns
Pronouns are words that are used instead of nouns or noun phrases. They usually refer to someone or something previously mentioned. It can be very challenging for readers to find the antecedent in a text. Practice identifying what the pronoun is referring to helps students not only understand the text more clearly but helps them make their own writing clearer. For example, “Tom told Jack that he lost his hat.” Without more information it’s unclear whose hat was lost.
Typically we study personal pronouns with our students but the demonstrative pronouns that, this, these and those can also be even more challenging. For example, the word that can be used in a variety of ways but as a pronoun we see it being used to stand in for a previously stated noun. For example, “That’s a good idea.”
Additionally, we might intuitively know that this and these refer to items close by (literally or metaphorically) and that and those for items further away. There’s no doubting there’s a midway point at which it’s unclear whether we should use this or that, these or those! Our students, especially multilingual learners, will benefit from explicit teaching about this usage.
In our suggested first study set of High Frequency Words we include the following words that can function as pronouns:
I, he, she, it, you, they, and that.
It’s pretty helpful that our highest frequency word, the, is cousins with this, that, these, and those. You can teach these words as a group, learning not just to spell them but how to use them.
About The High Frequency Word Project (Second Edition)
Here is a link here to learn more about The High Frequency Word Project, Second Edition and how to purchase it.
This new, all-in-one book, co-authored with Rebecca Loveless, contains an updated version of:
- The What and the Why: essential information about the English spelling system
- THE WORDS: 130 words explored by their history, their relationship to other words, and their grapheme-phoneme connections. Each entry is professional learning for teachers in bite-sized pieces.
- The Teaching Plan: a 3-step teaching process offering a detailed plan so teachers can get started right away. It includes explicit tools and strategies to help learners orthographically map the spelling of these words, and learn how to use them
- Resources including
- The Word List Compendium – suggested groupings for studying these words
- Activities and games
- the Assessment
- Printables
The List of Words
The 130 words are mainly function words. We know that the 100 most commonly occurring English words make up approximately half the words we use and so it’s key we get students to orthographically map them as soon as possible.
In the Second Edition Rebecca and I added a whole new group of words that older students often struggle with. Words such as definitely, through, and special. We have organised the words into six suggested study sets. You can see the whole list here:
Free Downloadable Resources
You can make your own study sheets for your students as we include templates in the book. We also have an option to purchase the study booklets many of you know from the 1st Edition. These are pdfs with the rights to copy for your students. They are organised by suggested study sets. You can find out more about this here.
I have included the pages for she as a free download for you.
If you are working with older students you might like to download this note-taking template they could use to show what they have learned about this or any word you choose to deep dive into.
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