Word meaning often depends on a “one-phoneme” difference, such as in minimal pair words. The position of the phoneme in the word is important in determining meaning. Ex: bear, fair, pair, spare and in pat, pit, pot, put.

Special attention is given to English phonemes that don’t exist in Spanish

Morphological Awareness

A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning. Morphemes can be combined in words to change or expand their meaning. Some spelling is morphological rather than phonological.

The past tense inflection is most frequently spelled by adding –ed to the verb, regardless of how it is pronounced. Ex: pushed, shoved, & shouted all end in –ed but the morpheme is pronounced differently in each case.

Ending can be added to words to change their meaning, such as to make express little, few or less or bigger and/or more. Ex. Casa, casita, casona; un ruidito, un ruidón; grandísimo, grandotote, grandecito.

There is the construct “word” that describes the boundaries of a linguistic unit that expresses an abstract conceptual referent. Knowledge of categories or classification schemas for words helps us understand “word families” that convey related meanings.

Some words sound the same but have different spellings according to their meaning in context. Ex:  there, their, & they’re; two, to, & too

Some words are spelled the same but have different meanings. The accent mark is used to distinguish these words from one another. Ex: Sí, si; tú, tu; este, éste.

Syntactic Awareness

Word order often signals meaning. There are groups of words in a certain order that have a particular meaning that separately they do not have (idiomatic expressions, phrasal verbs, etc.)

Teaching idiomatic expressions as a unit of meaning. Ex:

The difference in meaning between “The man ran out of the burning building...” as compared to “The man ran out of gas on the freeway…”

Two-word and three-word phrases have different meanings depending on the word order. Ex: un hombre pobre, un pobre hombre; el antiguo presidente, el presidente antiguo; una señora grande, una gran señora (gran is an “apócope” of grande); “Más vale un vieja mula que una mula vieja:”