What are Word Clusters?
Word clusters are groups of words based on a common theme. The easiest way to build a cluster is by collecting synonyms for a particular word. The group of synonyms becomes a cluster which has one common meaning and for that one meaning, you have effectively learnt multiple words.
What is the benefit of such an approach?
The benefit of such an approach is: you get to learn group of words with the help of a single meaning. In the language of sets, for one meaning entered into the storage area of your brain, you learn multiple words. This can be labeled as effective usage of memory and that is what we require, don’t we? Also, the multiplicity of learning carries the bigger benefit of rapidly escalating your learning speed. You can learn a vast number of words in a very quick time.
Grab the Unbelievable Offer:
Let’s practice the skill of making clusters:
In this series of articles, we explore two clusters in every article. The two clusters will combine to teach you 10 to 12 words. The theme of the cluster is based on the common meaning for the words. The individual meanings of the distinct words in the cluster are also provided (with every cluster).
Cluster 1: Words related to the sentiment of something being boring or uninteresting
In this group we deal with words that are related to sentiment of something being boring or uninteresting. These words can be used in a variety of situations.
You can go through the words here:
- Banal: Repeated too often.
- Hackneyed: Overfamiliar through overuse.
- Clichéd: Repeated regularly without thought or originality.
- Mundane: Found in the ordinary course of events.
- Humdrum: Not challenging; dull and lacking excitement.
- Vapid: Lacking significance or liveliness or spirit or zest.
- Tedious: So lacking in interest as to cause mental weariness.
Cluster 2: Words related to the sentiment of hatred
In this cluster, explore words related to the sentiment of hatred. These words describe a variety of words related to the sentiment of hating someone. You can identify the ones that you can use in some context as well.
Go through the words here:
- Abhorrence: Hate coupled with disgust.
- Loathing: Find repugnant.
- Disgust: Strong feelings of dislike.
- Odium: State of disgrace resulting from detestable behavior.
- Aversion: A feeling of intense dislike.
- Antipathy: The object of a feeling of intense aversion; something to be avoided.
- The two clusters above showcase how the method of cluster formation can be used for expanding your word-power. Use this method and your vocabulary database will surely grow exponentially.
Best Wishes!!
Table of Contents
- What is clustering in reading?
- What is a clustering strategy?
- What are the 4 reading strategies?
- What is clustering of ideas?
- What is cluster method in teaching?
- What is cluster in simple English?
- What is cluster concept?
A cluster is defined as “a small, close group.” Word Clusters are groups of words sharing the same global con- cept. For example, house, cabin, mansion, and shack are similar in that they are all forms of shelter.
What is clustering in reading?
Clustering is a type of pre-writing that allows a writer to explore many ideas as soon as they occur to them. Like brainstorming or free associating, clustering allows a writer to begin without clear ideas. Write quickly, circling each word, and group words around the central word.
What is a clustering strategy?
Cluster Strategy: Promote business clusters by focusing resources and regulatory policies toward developing and retaining businesses in a number of discrete sectors that demonstrate opportunity to advance City goals and enhance the region’s economic strength.
What are the 4 reading strategies?
Figure. Reciprocal teaching is a scaffolded, or supported, discussion technique that incorporates four main strategies—predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing—that good readers use together to comprehend text. Think about how you use these strategies in your own reading as an adult.
What is clustering of ideas?
Clustering is used to organize and analyse large numbers of ideas by categorising them. By organising and reorganising ideas, students gain a better appreciation of, and dialogue about, their ideas. As students create idea clusters, new contexts and connections among themes emerge.
What is cluster method in teaching?
Cluster grouping is an educational process in which four to six gifted and talented (GT) or high-achieving students or both are assigned to an otherwise heterogeneous classroom within their grade to be instructed by a teacher who has had specialized training in differentiating for gifted learners.
What is cluster in simple English?
A cluster is a small group of people or things. When you and your friends huddle awkwardly around the snack table at a party, whispering and trying to muster enough nerve to hit the dance floor, you’ve formed a cluster. Cluster comes to us from the Old English word clyster, meaning bunch.
What is cluster concept?
A cluster concept is one that is defined by a weighted list of criteria, such that no one of these criteria is either necessary or sufficient for membership. People say, for instance, that democracy is a cluster concept; Denis Dutton has recently argued that art is a cluster concept. …
Table of Contents
- What is a word cluster?
- What is cluster in a sentence?
- What is cluster in mobile communication?
- What is another word for cluster?
- What is a cluster of trees called?
- What is a clump?
- What is a clump of grass called?
- What is the clump of trees?
- What is blood clumping?
- Is blood clumping bad?
A cluster is defined as “a small, close group.” Word Clusters are groups of words sharing the same global con- cept. For example, house, cabin, mansion, and shack are similar in that they are all forms of shelter.
What is cluster in a sentence?
Clusters sentence example. Small clusters of people were gathered at every vantage point. The two men continued walking past clusters of bikers. He could see its shadow as he peeped out through the clusters of leaves.
What is cluster in mobile communication?
The group of cells where the available frequency spectrum is totally consumed is called a cluster of cells. Two cells having the same number in the adjacent cluster, use the same set of RF channels and hence are termed as “Co-channel cells”. Hence, the cellular systems are limited by Co-channel interference.
What is another word for cluster?
What is another word for cluster?
| group | bunch |
|---|---|
| package | bundle |
| crop | agglomeration |
| boodle | aggregate |
| conglomeration | chunk |
What is a cluster of trees called?
A grove is a small group of trees with minimal or no undergrowth, such as a sequoia grove, or a small orchard planted for the cultivation of fruits or nuts. Other words for groups of trees include woodland, woodlot, thicket, or stand.
What is a clump?
1 : a group of things clustered together a clump of bushes. 2 : a cluster or lump of something A clump of mashed potatoes fell on his lap. 3 : a heavy tramping sound.
What is a clump of grass called?
Synonyms, crossword answers and other related words for CLUMP OF GRASS [tussock]
What is the clump of trees?
A clump of things such as trees or plants is a small group of them growing together.
What is blood clumping?
Agglutination is the clumping of particles. When people are given blood transfusions of the wrong blood group, the antibodies react with the incorrectly transfused blood group and as a result, the erythrocytes clump up and stick together causing them to agglutinate.
Is blood clumping bad?
According to the Nobel Prize website, mixing two different blood types “can lead to blood clumping or agglutination. The clumped red cells can crack and cause toxic reactions.” The problem is the immune system.
One of the reasons why you can’t understand spoken English is word clusters. But before I talk about word clusters, make sure you look at the first post in this series. The post explains the key concepts of the Greenhouse, the Garden and the Jungle.
So, what are word clusters?
Word clusters are groups of high-frequency function words
that are squeezed together. Function words show a grammatical or structural relationship. They don’t have much meaning attached to them like content words. For example, some function words are: and, was, the, in, over and many more. Also, if you look in an online dictionary you’ll be able to hear the weak forms of function words. Listen to three ways you pronounce ‘have’ in the Macmillan dictionary.
As you can imagine, these function words become very hard to
hear in ‘the jungle’. For example, the phrase ‘And it was a nice day’, in the garden, might sound like /æn dɪt wɒz ʌ/. But in the ‘squeeze zone’ of ‘the jungle’ it becomes /æ nɪt wə zə/ Let’s look more closely at what’s happening in ‘the squeeze zone’.
The Squeeze Zone
Three things can happen when word clusters squeeze together:
One: The schwa /ə/ or the upside down ‘e’. I like to call it the lazy sound because it’s just a /ə/ or uh – there’s no effort involved in producing this sound. In word clusters you’ll often hear the weak form of these function words and the weak form includes – you guessed it – the schwa. Remember in the example above, the /ɒ/ in ‘was’ was replaced by /ə/.
Two: Consonant sounds may also get cut out. In the example ‘and’ became /ən/ and the /d / sound drops out.
Three: Sounds might also link together. Looking at the example again, we have /n/ of ‘and’ linking to ‘it’ /æ nɪt/. We also have the /z/ sound of ‘was’ linking to ‘a’ /wə sə/. And there you have it: ‘and it was a’ becomes /æ nɪt wə zə/.
Now watch the video and have a go at writing down three word clusters. Remember to practice saying the word cluster as well. If you can’t say the cluster, it’ll be very hard to hear the word cluster.
To sum up, word clusters get squeezed together like a tube of toothpaste making them very hard to hear. To improve your listening, practice saying and listening to word clusters. After that, listen out for them when you’re watching YouTube or Netflix for example.
Also, sign up for my newsletter ‘The Sledgehammer’. I’ll send you a free booklet that’ll show you an online tool that will help you practice listening for word clusters. Finally, follow me on Instagram and Facebook to get your weekly word cluster listening practice.
One of the reasons why you can’t understand spoken English is word clusters. But before I talk about word clusters, make sure you look at the first post in this series. The post explains the key concepts of the Greenhouse, the Garden and the Jungle.
So, what are word clusters?
Word clusters are groups of high-frequency function words
that are squeezed together. Function words show a grammatical or structural relationship. They don’t have much meaning attached to them like content words. For example, some function words are: and, was, the, in, over and many more. Also, if you look in an online dictionary you’ll be able to hear the weak forms of function words. Listen to three ways you pronounce ‘have’ in the Macmillan dictionary.
As you can imagine, these function words become very hard to
hear in ‘the jungle’. For example, the phrase ‘And it was a nice day’, in the garden, might sound like /æn dɪt wɒz ʌ/. But in the ‘squeeze zone’ of ‘the jungle’ it becomes /æ nɪt wə zə/ Let’s look more closely at what’s happening in ‘the squeeze zone’.
The Squeeze Zone
Three things can happen when word clusters squeeze together:
One: The schwa /ə/ or the upside down ‘e’. I like to call it the lazy sound because it’s just a /ə/ or uh – there’s no effort involved in producing this sound. In word clusters you’ll often hear the weak form of these function words and the weak form includes – you guessed it – the schwa. Remember in the example above, the /ɒ/ in ‘was’ was replaced by /ə/.
Two: Consonant sounds may also get cut out. In the example ‘and’ became /ən/ and the /d / sound drops out.
Three: Sounds might also link together. Looking at the example again, we have /n/ of ‘and’ linking to ‘it’ /æ nɪt/. We also have the /z/ sound of ‘was’ linking to ‘a’ /wə sə/. And there you have it: ‘and it was a’ becomes /æ nɪt wə zə/.
Now watch the video and have a go at writing down three word clusters. Remember to practice saying the word cluster as well. If you can’t say the cluster, it’ll be very hard to hear the word cluster.
To sum up, word clusters get squeezed together like a tube of toothpaste making them very hard to hear. To improve your listening, practice saying and listening to word clusters. After that, listen out for them when you’re watching YouTube or Netflix for example.
Also, sign up for my newsletter ‘The Sledgehammer’. I’ll send you a free booklet that’ll show you an online tool that will help you practice listening for word clusters. Finally, follow me on Instagram and Facebook to get your weekly word cluster listening practice.
In my work I focus on word clusters as a key element of speech to focus on in the teaching of listening/decoding. The term ‘word cluster’ comes from Carter and McCarthy’s ‘Cambridge Grammar of English’ (2006), examples of word clusters include ‘a bit of a’ and ‘I was going to’. Other authors refer to them as recurrent chunks or formulaic chunks (Field, 2008: 155). Such clusters are an important component of all types of language, and I argue in ‘A Syllabus for Listening – Decoding’ that they are an essential component of the listening syllabus for all levels of learners, even advanced. It may seem surprising that I mention advanced learners but I do so because John Field’s research has shown that even advanced learners have difficulty with such clusters (Field, 2008: 146).
Another reason for focussing on them is that they occur across a wide variety of speech styles and topics. So learning the variety of possible sound shapes of these clusters provides high surrender value. But why do so, you may ask, surely we can ignore these bits and simply focus on the content words and thereby build meanings. No, no and three times no! Not if our learners want to learn the language, and not simply indulge in communicative coping.
Recordings as treasure troves of meaning
All recordings are treasure troves of sound shapes and soundscapes of the words and speech unit. All of the recording – not just the set of content words it contains – provides matter for teaching and learning. To go metaphorical for a moment – the gems of meaning are contained in, and surrounded by, layers of mineral substance – the sound substance of clusters of very common words. The way we currently focus on the meaning gems alone in our listening classes results in testing and coping activities, which don’t allow room to learn about, and learn how to handle, the mineral layers of sound substance in which the gems occur.
Clusters are fast
Part of the reason why word clusters are challenging for advanced learners is that they are often much faster than their immediate neighbours in the stream of speech.
Take for example one of the closing sentences of a TED talk by Julian Treasure, which goes
I’m going to leave you with with a little bit more birdsong
TED 660 JULIAN Treasure The 4 ways sound affects us 21 July 2009
Interestingly, the TED transcript gives fewer words than this: I’ll leave you with more birdsong – omitting words which don’t contribute hugely to meaning is quite common in such transcripts. The length of this talk is 5 minutes 26 seconds, with an average speed of 207.42 words per minute (as measured by the TED Corpus Search Engine here).
Speed of the sentence
I measure the duration of this sentence at 1.7 seconds. If we take a Garden approach to counting words (counting standard contractions – I’m and gonna – as single words, and I’m gonna as three syllables) then
- there are 10 words
- the speed is 5.9 words per second,
- which comes to 354 words per minute – 75% faster than the average speed
- there are 13 syllables
- the speed is 7.7 syllables per second
- which comes to 460 syllables per minute
So this whole sentence itself is already much faster than the talk as a whole. At this point I would like to compare the speed-in-syllables of this sentence with the speed-in-syllables of the recording as a whole, but I don’t have this available to me, but see below for more on speed as measured in syllables.
Speed of the cluster
Let’s turn our attention to the five-word cluster with a little bit more.
- I measure the duration at 0.663 seconds,
- there are 5 words
- the speed is 7.5 words per second
- which comes to 450 words per minute –
- there are six syllables
- the speed 9 syllables per second
- which comes to 540 syllables per minute
Thus this sentence goes at more than twice the average speed of the talk as a whole (207.42) and ca. 30% faster than the full sentence in which it occurs. Let’s now turn to a syllable count:
Just as I mentioned above, at this point I would like to compare the speed in syllables of this cluster with the speed-in-syllables of the recording as a whole, but I don’t have this available to me. However what we can do is compare it to the notions of ‘fastest’ speech in the research literature. A commonly accepted measure in the research literature of the ‘fastest’ speed for spontaneous speech is at 324 wpm or 5.4 sps (Field, 2019:63; Laver, 1994:541). This is way lower than both the sentence and the word cluster that we have looked at.
Does anyone know of any research into speed of speech that looks not just at minute-measured averages, but (as we have done above) what the extremes are that are hidden by average measures?