Word Families in English | Vocabulary Building A2

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A2–B1 · Word Grammar

Teach, Teaching, Taught — Word Families

📖 From my experience:
I arrived in Sydney with ‘horrible English’. But I had a secret: Bengali has lots of word families too. কাজ (work), কর্মী (worker), কর্মক্ষম (workable). Once I understood that English words also travel in families — teach → teacher → teaching → taught — my vocabulary quadrupled without learning four times as many words.

🎯 Language focus:
Word families = sets of words sharing a root, each a different grammatical class.

Example: teach
Verb: teach, taught
Noun: teacher, teaching, lesson, student
Adjective: teachable, taught
Adverb: educationally

Common suffixes: -er (person), -tion/-tion (noun), -able (adjective), -ly (adverb)

✅ Word family: decide
Verb: decide
Noun: decision
Adjective: decisive / undecided
Adverb: decisively
Example: She made a decisive decision to decide immediately.

Complete the word family

1. Verb: organise → Noun: ___ organisation

2. Noun: success → Adjective: ___ → Adverb: ___ successful → successfully

3. What suffix usually turns a verb into ‘a person who does it’? -er (teach→teacher, manage→manager, write→writer)

🧒 For younger learners: Build a ‘word tree’ — root word at the trunk, word family members as leaves. Young learners colour each part of speech a different colour.

👩‍🏫 Cambridge CELTA note: Word family teaching boosts vocabulary breadth rapidly. CELTA source: Nation’s *Learning Vocabulary in Another Language* — word family knowledge multiplies productive vocabulary. Use word family grids as warm-up activities. CCQ: ‘Is this a thing, an action, or a description?’

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Teach, Teaching, Taught — Word Families

Teach, Teaching, Taught — Word Families

Complete the word family

Find out what your English actually produces.

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