Project Six – Literacy 

 Is guessing from context always useful? 

Advantages  Disadvantages 
Walters (2004) agreed that guessing the Laufer and Sim (1985) insisted that the size of
meaning from the context might be useful in the vocabulary was a main variable
raising the students’ awareness about using which might negatively affect guessing from
the context as a clue.  the context because learners with low sizes
  of vocabulary, were unable to utilize it
effectively. Liu and Nation (1984) estimated
that, in advance, learners ought to know at
least 95 per cent of the context words in
order to be able to utilize the guessing
strategy 
 
Learning from the context is beneficial for Some EFL/ESL studies suggest that learners
those who have a well-developed known are often unable to guess the meaning of an
vocabulary. (Laufer and Sim, 1985). Guessing unknown word from a text (Bensoussan &
from the context is a helpful strategy for Laufer, 1984; Haynes, 1993; Kelly, 1990;
upper-intermediate and advanced L2 learner  Schatz & Baldwin, 1986). This suggests that 1)
  L2 learners in general, due to their
inadequate grasp of target language skills,
are less effective guessers and less effective
incidental learners of English vocabulary; and
if this is true for intermediate to advanced
learners, 2) beginning L2 learners who do not
have the basic language skills in the target
language to make sense of new words and
their contexts would have much more
trouble learning vocabulary incidentally. 
An important variable was the size of the Learners should be aware of the fact that
learner’s working memory. For example, guessing from the context doesn`t give
results from different studies, about guessing the quite correct meaning because it
from the context, indicated that does not give the words’ exact meaning but a
guessing contributed to a learner’s storage positive hint to the meaning. 
of vocabulary.   
 
  Walters (2006) stated that guessing
words from context was an effective method
for L1 learners but not for L2 learners. Some
studies argued that the quantity of
words, learnt from the context, was still lower
than learnt other strategies.  
 
(Nation, 2001) He assumed, also, that when guessing is inappropriate
learners checked their dictionaries, for beginners because they lacked
after guessing the meaning from the context, enough quantity of vocabulary to guess.
the rate of retained meaning would be high.  Yongqi Gu (2003) 
 
Conducted studies indicated that students Beck et al. (1983) argued that even the
ought to be trained, through training contexts varied between each other.  Some
sessions, on how to guess, using the context contexts were very helpful in giving clear
clues and other strategies to increase the knowledge of the meaning of the word whilst
effectiveness of guessing the meaning of the others were not. Consequently, this was a
words.   drawback which ought to be acknowledged
as problematic and which might affect the
efficiency of guessing. For instance, guessing
from general and natural contexts was
different from guessing from contexts
specially constructed for specific purpose.
Therefore, especially for teachers, this ought
to be kept in mind. 
 
 
 
References: 
Beck, I.L., McKeown, M.G. and McCaslin, E.S. (1983) 'Vocabulary development: All contexts are not created equal'. The Elementary School
Journal 
Gu, Y. and Johnson, R.K. (1996) 'Vocabulary learning strategies and language learning outcomes'. Language learning, 46(4), pp. 643-679. 
Laufer, B. and Sim, D.D. (1985) 'Measuring and explaining the reading threshold needed for English for academic purposes texts'. Foreign Language
Annals, 18(5), pp. 405-411. 
Nation, I. S. P. (2001) Learning vocabulary in another language.CUP 
Walters, J.D. (2006) 'Methods of teaching inferring meaning from context'. RELC Journal, 37(2), pp. 176-190. 
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