Using Context to Infer Word Meaning: Teaching Tips for Supporting EFL Students

Word knowledge, word families, vocabulary size and text coverage are component skills and knowledge help set the stage for understanding how context affects an EFL students' ability to infer word meaning.

Word knowledge includes meaning, register, orthography, phonology, grammar, collocations, frequency, and associations. (Nation, 1990)

Vocabulary Threshold

The threshold vocabulary can be defined as words whose forms and common meanings are recognized automatically irrespective of context.

The level at which good L1 readers can be expected to transfer their reading strategies to L2 (including successful guessing) is 3,000 word families. Until they have reached this level, such transfer will be hampered by an insufficient knowledge of vocabulary.

In terms of text coverage, the 3,000 word families are reported to provide coverage of between 90% and 90% of any text. The figure claimed to be necessary for text comprehension is 95% of text coverage. 95% coverage will give the minimum passing grade (56%) on a reading comprehension test. The higher the comprehension level expected, the larger the vocabulary should be.

How is an increase in vocabulary quantity related to the improvement in reading? An increase in 1,000 words results in an increase of 7% on a comprehension test. 3,000 word families results in a reading score of 56%, a knowledge of 4,000 is 63%, 5,000 is 70% and 6,000 is 77%. (Laufer, 1997)

Using context to infer word meaning

When an EFL learner does not understand a word in a text, he or she has the following options:

1. Ignore it (if it is considered unimportant), look it up in a dictionary.
2. Ask someone who knows its meaning
3. Try to guess it from context.

As Paul Nation and Ron Carter state, in "Vocabulary Acquisition," "But an attempt to guess (regardless of whether it is successful or not) presupposes awareness on the part of learners that they are facing an unknown word. If such awareness is not there, no attempt is made to infer the missing meaning. This is precisely the case with deceptively transparent words or words that are not recognized as unfamiliar by the reader. Learners think they known them, and assign the wrong meaning to them, distorting the immediate context in this way. The misinterpreted words will sometimes serve as clues for guessing words that the learner recognizes as unknown, which may lead to larger distortions."

Graphically, the process can be represented in the following manner:

1. unawareness of ignore of DT words. (deceptive transparent) words
2. Misinterpretation of DT words.
3. Distortion of immediate context
4. Using context for further interpretation
5. Distortion of larger context.
(Laufer, 1997)

Factors that affect guessing
1. Nonexistant contextual clues (availability of clues)
2. Unusuable contextual clues (familiarity with the clue words)
3. Misleading and partial clues (presence of misleading clues)
4. Suppressed clues (compatibility between the reader's schemata and the text content. (Laufer, 1997)

Works Cited

Laufer, B. and K. Shmueli. 1997. Memorizing new words: does teaching have anything to do with it? RELC Journal 28/1: 89-108.

Laufer, B. and M. Kimmel. 1997. Bilingualised dictionaries: how learners really use them. System
25/3: 361-369.

Laufer, B. and L. Hadar. 1997. Assessing the effectiveness of monolingual,bilingual and 'biligualised' dictionaries. The Modern Language Journal 81/2: 189-196.

"Vocabulary Acquisition" (1989) Paul Nation and Ron Carter (eds.) Aila Review