Universidad Nacional de Trujillo Dra. Erika Aguilar Carrera
READING TO DEDUCE MEANING
Guessing Vocabulary from Context
When you encounter unfamiliar vocabulary in an English reading selection, what is
your typical response? Do you bring out your bilingual or English monolingual
dictionary to look up the word? Do you then spend precious moments looking through
all the definitions to decide which one fits? Have you ever finally decided on a
definition only to realize that you have forgotten what you were reading and must begin
the sentence or paragraph all over again?
Over-reliance on a dictionary not only slows down your reading but may interfere with
your comprehension as well. A better strategy is to use the context, the words and
sentences surrounding a particular word, to help you guess that word's meaning. Usually
the guesses you make will be accurate enough for you to understand the author's ideas.
When they are not, or when the terms require an exact technical definition, you can use
your English dictionary as a back-up resource.
What is context?
To better understand the meaning of the word context, let’s look at the meaning of its
parts: “con-” and “text.”
Con- This prefix means “with” or “together”
Text You might know that “text” means “reading material,” but did you know that the
Latin root of this word, texere, means “to weave?”
When you put them together, con and text make a pretty important and powerful word
that could be defined like this:
Context = the surrounding circumstances, ideas and words woven together to form the
setting or background for an event, statement, or idea.
Context—the words or ideas expressed before and after— provides us with the
information we need to fully understand, evaluate or interpret the ideas in the passage.
Example: “You misinterpreted my words because you took them out of context. I did
say that I was hesitant to bake cookies for the fundraiser, but it’s not because I don’t
want to participate, as you claim. I also told you I ran out of butter, and the last time I
made cookies, nobody bought them.”
Students encounter unfamiliar words all of the time, but few slow down to think about
what they can learn about those unfamiliar words based on how they are used. The
ability to define unfamiliar vocabulary is a life skill that teachers need to teach
explicitly. We cannot assume that students will know how to do this without instruction
and practice. Below are five strategies I encourage students to use when they encounter
new words in a text.
1. Look at the parts of the word. Are there any roots in the word? Does the word
sound like another word you know?
