Somebody Has to Teach the Bridge

Cognates are one of those things we all know about but maybe haven’t really learned much about. Like, we feel the recognition but we don’t necessarily understand how or why cognates actually help us understand language. As language teachers, we might mention it when it comes up. Oh, hey — océano, ocean. Same word. The kids nod. We keep going.

I remember being on the other end of this in Spanish class as a kid — realizing that a word I was supposed to be learning was one I already knew, and getting a small thrill out of it. But nobody really explained what was going on, and it took me a long time to understand how much was getting skipped. The research is pretty clear about the value of teaching cognates for language learning: Dressler and colleagues (2011) found that recognizing cognates depends on explicit instruction and on a student's metalinguistic awareness. It isn't a free transfer that happens because two words look alike. Somebody has to teach the bridge.

And when somebody does, it helps. Carlo et al. (2004) taught fifth graders academic vocabulary through context, morphology, and cognates, using a rotation of activity types and real text, and as a result English learners were able to demonstrate comprehension on-par with their English-only classmates. The IES practice guide on literacy for English learners says the same thing in plainer language, and its strongest recommendation is to teach academic vocabulary intensively, over several days, through a variety of instructional activities.

Which is why I want to show you what Alicia Pearce built for her students at Huron Schools, here in Michigan.

Her goal was to create a resource that explicitly helped students understand cognates: "This resource is meant for English language learners. It helps students identify words that are similar in both English and Spanish, and goes further by teaching them about Latin roots." She points to UDL as what shaped the design: "students engage with content in a variety of formats."

The sequencing in this lesson is where it really feels effective and aligned with the research. Students start by matching elefante to elephant, jardín to garden. Then they read a short narrative, "The Bilingual Explorer," where those same words show up bolded in a story about a kid at a museum, and they fill in a Cognate Hunt table themselves. Then fill-in-the-blank sentences that make them work from context instead of matching shapes. Then bingo, where a classmate has to supply the Spanish word and sign for it. Then a team scavenger hunt of riddles built from the passage.

The lesson relies on one word bank with a series of activities that invite students to identify and work with cognates in different ways: on their own, with a partner, inside a reading. Then it keeps going. A Latin Root Detective page walks from important to port to transport and portable. That's morphological instruction, and Bowers, Kirby & Deacon (2010) found it helps every reader, with the largest gains going to the ones who struggle most.

The advanced version is my favorite part. Those students don't translate words. They state the rule (English -y becomes Spanish -ía) and defend it to a classmate. Alicia was honest about why that matters: "We often struggle to reach learners who are ready for advanced exploration of content." That's a real gap in a lot of buildings, and it usually stays a gap because of time, not because teachers don't see it. Alicia already knew exactly which of her kids were ready for that move. What she needed was a version of Tuesday night short enough to actually build it — and then the room to read every line, change what didn't fit, and make it hers.

Here’s the original resource, shared with Alicia's permission. If there's a version of this your roster needs, go build it.

I’d love to hear how it went! Send me your story at matt@diffit.me.