Semantics Mapping

            Semantic mapping is a visual strategy for vocabulary expansion and extension of knowledge by displaying in categories words related to one another.  Semantic mapping is an adaptation of concept definition mapping but builds on students prior knowledge or schema.  While it draws on prior knowledge it recognizes important components and shows the relationships among the components.  The framework of semantic mapping includes: the concept word, two category examples, and other examples.  This is a very interactive process and should be modeled by the teacher first.  The steps involved in semantic mapping are: write the concept word on the board, explain the steps involved and have students think of as many words as they can for the concept word, write the list on the board or overhead and have students copy it, and finally in groups have students put the words into categories.

            Semantic mapping is a strategy for graphically representing concepts. Semantic maps portray the schematic relations that compose a concept. It assumes that there are multiple relations between a concept and the knowledge that is associated with the concept. Thus, for any concept there are at least these three types of associations:

·         associations of class-- the order of things the concept falls into;

·         associations of property-- the attributes that define the concept; and

·         associations of example-- exemplars of the concept.

            Purpose:

·         To help students identify important ideas and how these ideas fit together.

·         To provide an alternative format to the outline.

            For example, Pearson and Johnson offer the example of the concept of "federal," attached. Notice that federal is in the class of things called "forms of government." It is one of many such forms, including monarchy, patriarchy, plutocracy, etc. The properties of federal include a) the uniting common interests of various political units like sovereign states and b) the division of power among subunits like the legislative, judicial, and executive units of our own government. Examples of the federal form of government include the governments of the United States, Canada, and Australia.

            Procedure

            A semantic map is created in a dialog among students and their teacher, and it will always go something like what follows as a hypothetical case:

·         Teacher: Tell me some things that come to mind when you think of the word "ecology."

·         Student(s): Environment. Pollution? Conservation! Recycling. Has it got anything to do with the "-olgy" on the end of the word?

·         Teacher: (listing words on chalkboard) You've got some good ideas here and I think you've studied this before. Since you mention the "-olgy" part of the word, it might help if I tell you that the "eco-" part of the word comes into English from a Greek word for "house."

·         Student(s): Ha! It's the study of our house!

·         Teacher: Sounds good to me, but we don't mean house in the usual sense here, do we. It's more like the idea of where we live, right?

·         Student(s): But isn't it about how we treat the house? Like respect for our environment? And cleaning up after ourselves?

·         Teacher: O.K., let's put that down, too. Anything else you remember about this idea of ecology?

            In a conversation like this, it is almost inevitable that relations of the 3 basic kinds (class, example, and property) will emerge. Ecology is a kind of study. Ecology is exemplified by cleaning up after ourselves, protecting the environment, conservation, and recycling; it is not pollution. One property of ecology is the idea of respect. As the conversation proceeds, other ideas of these sorts of relations might emerge and can then be rearranged on the chalkboard or overhead transparency into a proper semantic map.

            The major purpose of the semantic map is to allow students to organize their prior knowledge into these formal relations and thus to provide themselves a basis for understanding what they are re about to read and study. Comprehension can be thought of as the elaboration and refinement of prior knowledge. What the semantic map provides is a graphic structure of that knowledge to be used as the basis for organizing new ideas as they are understood.