Category Archives: English Language Arts

Here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective obscure. This is another of those polysemous words whose array of meanings may surprise you.

In everyday discourse, we mostly use it to mean “not readily understood or clearly expressed.” But it can also mean “dark, dim, shrouded in or hidden by darkness, not clearly seen or easily distinguished, faint”; “relatively unknown,  remote, secluded, not prominent or famous”; and, interestingly, “constituting the unstressed vowel \ə\ or having unstressed \ə\ as its value.” Obscure can also be used as a verb, but that’s another worksheet and another post.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Here are a pair of context clues worksheets, the first on on model as a noun and the second on model as a verb. The word, as you surely know, also has use as an adjective; a couple of days after publishing this post, while rummaging around in my data warehouse, I found this worksheet on model as an adjective, so for the purposes of this post, you have a complete set from which to choose. Incidentally, the verb is used both intransitively and transitively.

It is generally the practice at Mark’s Text Terminal to provide the definitions on the face of the post. However, these are polysemous words, so I’ll recommend you find them in a dictionary (preferably Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, 11th Edition, the house lexicon on this blog) to determine which meaning you want to emphasize with your students. Editorially, let me mention that these words offer teachers a chance to help students to understand polysemy, which might help them understand (and I would argue this is vital information for English language learners) why English can be a challenging language to master.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.