What does word study look like?

My Principal Peer Group is reading sections of Guiding Readers and Writers by Fountas and Pinnell. This month we are reading the chapter entitled Teaching for Word-Solving: Phonics, Spelling, and Vocabulary. I'll be sharing some excerpts from this chapter followed by some thoughts and reflections. Here's a good introduction to the chapter.

Word study is not so much about learning individual words as it is about learning how written language is organized - how written language "works." There are many word-solving strategies you can teach students to help them learn important concepts related to decoding, spelling, and vocabulary. You can also support word solving during reading and writing.

It seems to me that the main idea of this chapter is that teachers increase students' knowledge of words by explicitly teaching word-solving strategies and helping students apply these strategies as they read and write.