Author Q&A: Teaching Cognates/Cognados Through Picture Books

Spanish-English cognates are words that are orthographically and semantically the same or nearly the same in both Spanish and English as a result of a common etymology. There are over 20,000 such cognates, and most of these are academic vocabulary words essential for understanding the texts found at all levels of education.

Here are some common examples of Spanish-English cognates:

Spanish                 English
conclusión           conclusion
hospital                 hospital
invisible                 invisible
popular                  popular
tractor                   tractor

Here are some more examples:

Spanish                  English
ambulancia           ambulance
ecología                 ecology
optimista              optimist
presencia              presence
velocidad              velocity

Many of the most important vocabulary words useful for understanding informational texts are Spanish-English cognates derived from Latin and Greek. More than one-third to one-half of the words used by educated persons are Spanish-English cognates.

Specific cognate instruction, such as that presented in our book, provides teachers with lessons on how to teach vocabulary-building techniques such as using context clues, the morphological correspondences between English and Spanish, and spelling rules for converting words from one language to the other. We provide lessons for teaching useful rules for recognizing and generating English (and Spanish) words from their Spanish (and English) cognates. All of the lessons and strategies presented are intended to increase the vocabularies of young bilingual learners, resulting in higher levels of reading comprehension and academic success.

At the metacognitive level, Spanish-English cognate instruction legitimizes the use of a student’s native language, be it Spanish or English, in the learning of a second language. Knowing that there is a large category of words known as “cognates” provides language learners with the abilities to divine the meanings of unknown words on their own, as well as giving them the power to participate and share in language discussions with parents, teachers, and friends.

Prominent reading educators such as Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown have long suggested that picture books are an effective medium for enriching vocabulary because they contain many Tier Two (adult) and Tier Three (specialized) words that require instruction. In our own research, we have found that high-quality picture books, those that have been honored and suggested by literacy organizations, contain many Spanish-English cognates. Furthermore, the picture books from which we draw the cognate words to teach represent all the disciplinary areas that comprise elementary education: literacy, mathematics, science, and the social sciences.

Our cognate lessons plans are easy for teachers to incorporate into their teaching practice. This is because the cognate strategies we present are those that teachers already use in their general vocabulary and reading lessons, such as teaching context clues, morphology, and spelling.

In the book, we also include activities for reinforcing and extending the cognate strategies we present in the lessons. We provide ideas for anchor charts, word walls, flashcards, sentence completion, and analogy exercises.

An important component of the Cognate Companion is the database listing over 3,000 award-winning, high-quality picture books, and the Spanish-English cognates that comprise each book. Once a teacher has located a picture book in the database, they can review all the cognates in the picture book and decide on the words they want to teach their language learners. The database includes each picture book’s reading level and the tiered level of each cognate. Also provided are prefixes, root words, and suffix rules corresponding to each cognate. In addition, we give teachers the applicable spelling rules, if possible, for transforming a word to its English or Spanish cognate. All this information allows teachers to plan what cognates they want to teach, as well as what morphology or spelling lesson(s) they want to include with their picture book read-aloud. We will continue to update and build the Cognate Companion throughout the year.

The Cognate Companion also includes 300 ready-made lesson plans to accompany specific picture books in English, Spanish, or both. As part of our commitment to bilingual education, we will also be adding more and more lesson plans to the Cognate Companion.