Contextual

Clues
The Sense of the Sentence
•The reader has to get the general sense
or meaning of the sentence to get some
ideas about one unfamiliar term. To do
this, he has to ask questions about the
sentence. The question plus the answer
must have some connection with the
unfamiliar term.
Example
•You cannot easily change the
stand of an obdurate person.

•The strong winds will make your

hair appear scraggly.
Use of synonyms
•Synonyms are words that have the same
or nearly the same meaning.
Pogi\

•Synonym in the sentence is signaled by a

comma, dash, parentheses, a link or
series of synonymous terms, or a
restatement of the difficult term in more
familiar words in a phrase, clause, or
another sentence.
•By commas to separate the appositive
from the other words in the sentence.
Example: The Volvo, a car, costs a million pesos.

The conundrum, a riddle, is one of the ancient

forms of Philippine poetry.
 • By parentheses
Example: She wants to establish a liaison (a
close bond) with the officers.

Give me the penultimate (next to the last)

syllable of the word.
• By restatement or expression of the
word in a more familiar term
•A clergyman, a priest, wields
tremendous influence on every member
of the community.
 Use of Examples
•Study these examples to discover what their
similarities are, then associate these
similarities with the word he does not
understand, to know exactly what the
unfamiliar term means. The comma is the
punctuation mark used to signal the presence
of examples in the sentence.
 Example
•Novels, poetry, drama, short stories, and folk
tales belong to a fictional genre.

•The gadgets he was allowed to examine are:

hair dryer, mixer, heater and polisher.
 Use of Comparison or Analogy
•Comparing the difficult term to another word
will reveal similarities that can be used by the
reader as clues to the meaning of the difficult
term. Expressions such as: similar to, like,
as…as and the same are what the text uses in
comparing things, places and persons.
Example
•The lion is as ferocious as a crocodile that is
capable of gobbling up a whole human being.