(LUẬN văn THẠC sĩ) the effectiveness of guessing the meanings of unknown words from context by non english 10th graders at nguyen trai gifted high school, hai duong

Despite the fact that guessing the meanings of unknown words from context has proved to be an invaluable strategy in the learning of English vocabulary, it has not been formally and care

ABSTRACT

Guessing the meanings of unknown words from context has been considered to

be an effective skill in vocabulary acquisition and language skills development In order

to study the effectiveness of the guesswork, this research investigated the guessing

Duong, through two tests A pre-test was given to students to identify their guessing ability before training After the training period, which lasted three weeks, the students were required to do a post-test to find out their improvement in the guessing ability In addition, the author surveyed ten English teachers at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School to get their opinions on teaching and training the guessing strategy The results indicated that the ability to guess is useful for students to deal with reading texts containing new words Finally, the findings were discussed, and some suggestions and implications for applying the guessing skill in language teaching and learning were also proposed at the end of the thesis

ELT: English Language Teaching

LIST OF CHARTS AND TABLES

Chart 1: The pre-test results

Chart 2: Teachers’ ways of dealing with new words

Chart 3: The frequency of using the guessing skill

Chart 4: The problems relating to using the guessing skill

Chart 5: Teachers’ solutions to the problems

Chart 6: The post-test results

Table 1: The students’ ability to use the guessing techniques

Table 2: The effectiveness of the guessing techniques

Acknowledgements ……… ii

Abstract ……… … iii

List of abbreviations ……….… iv

List of charts, and tables ……… …… iv

Table of contents ……… ………… .v

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale ……… … 1

2 Aims of the study ………2

3 Research questions …… ……… 2

4 Scope of the study ………2

5 Significance of the study ……….2

6 Methods of the study ……… ……… 3

7 Design of the study ……… 3

PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Definition of context ……… ……… …… 4

1.2 Guessing the meanings of unknown words from context as a technique of vocabulary teaching and learning ……….……… … 5

1.3 Some previous studies on guessing the meanings of unknown words from contexts 8

1.4 Guessing strategies ……… … 10

1.5 Learner-strategy training ……… ……….…… 12

Chapter summary ……… …16

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 2.1 The setting of the study and participants……… 17

2.1.1 The school ……….… 17

2.1.2 Participants ……… 17

2.2 Three main stages of the action research ……… … 18

2.2.1 Pre – Improvement stage ……….……… 18

2.2.1.2 Conducting an informal interview about the way the students guessed …….…18

Step 2: Finding causes of the problem ……….…19

2.2.1.3 Consulting with colleagues ……… 19

2.2.1.4 Reading professional books/ journals for ideas and suggestions ……… 19

2.2.2 Trying – out stage ……… ……19

Step 3: Designing strategies for improvements ……… 19

Step 4: Trying out strategies and making notes on what happened in the class …………21

2.2.3 Post – Improvement stage ……… …22

Step 5: Evaluating the try – out ……….22

2.2.3.1 Giving a post-test to evaluate the students’ improvement ……… …… 22

2.2.3.2 Designing a questionnaire for students to identify the techniques that they have used to guess the meanings of unknown words ……… …….22

2.3.3 Conducting an informal interview to identify the changes ……… 23

2.3 Data analysis procedure ……….… 23

Chapter summary ……… 23

CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 3.1 The results of the instruments before the training period ……… …… 24

3.1.1 The results of the pre-test ………24

3.1.2 The results of the interview ……… ……… 25

3.1.3 The results of the questionnaire for the teachers ……….… 26

3.2 The results of the instruments after the training period ……… 29

3.2.1 The results of the post-test ……… 29

3.2.2 The results of interviews ……… 31

3.2.3 The results of the questionnaire for the students ……….33

Chapter summary ……… 36

PART THREE: CONCLUSION 1 Summary of the findings ……… …… 38

2 Conclusions ……… …… 39

3 Limitations of the study ……… 39

References ……… 41

Appendix A: Text for the pre-test ……… ……… I Appendix B: Questionnaire for teachers ………II Appendix C: Training lesson 1 ……….…… III Appendix D: Training lesson 2 ……… VIII Appendix E: Training lesson 3 ……….… X Appendix F: Text for the post-test ……… XI Appendix G: Questionnaire for students ……… ……… XII

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Vocabulary acquisition has always received a great deal of attention in any language learning process In English language learning, vocabulary is extremely important as there are many words in the English language Reading texts are often potential sources for students to improve their vocabulary stocks While reading a text, students encounter new words and to comprehend the content of the text they have to know the meanings of these words The most common phenomenon that can be observed in non-major classes of English in Nguyen Trai Gifted High School is that when students see an unknown word, they will turn to bilingual dictionaries or ask their teacher for its meaning This results in students’ over-reliance on the bilingual dictionaries and their teachers while the reading speed may be slowed down More seriously, they may easily forget the meaning of the unknown word as they have no difficulty getting its meaning In fact, the comprehension of words involves a series of skills or activities, one of which is guessing the meaning of unknown words from context This reading strategy has a long history of research with the great majority of studies demonstrating its value It has often been suggested that learning vocabulary through context should be employed as the main approach to enhancing vocabulary knowledge A number of researchers such as Clarke and Nation (1980) and Gairns and Redman (1986) have claimed that to learn words in context and not in isolation is an effective vocabulary learning strategy Therefore, enabling students

to derive word meanings with the help of contextual clues has become a teacher’s main task in order to increase students’ vocabulary Despite the fact that guessing the meanings of unknown words from context has proved to be an invaluable strategy in the learning of English vocabulary, it has not been formally and carefully introduced into English classes in high schools in Vietnam Some research on reading strategies has mentioned this strategy as a good one but little attempt has been made to instruct teachers in training students with this skill; and more importantly, little has been made to investigate the effectiveness of this strategy on the improvement of students’ proficiency of vocabulary and reading comprehension Therefore, I decided to carry out this study to explore whether this strategy was suitable for my students and if it was suitable, how I, as an English teacher, could do to develop my students’ guessing ability

2 Aims of the study

The study was carried out to:

(1) Find out how effective guessing the meaning of unknown words from context was (2) Suggest some realistic and appropriate pedagogical implications to improve students’ ability in guessing the meaning of unknown words from contexts

3 Research questions

To achieve the aims and objectives of the thesis, the following research questions were proposed:

(1) How effective is guessing the meanings of unknown words from context?

(2) In what conditions are students more successful in guessing the meanings of unknown words from context?

(3) What factors limit the effectiveness of guessing unknown words from context?

4 Scope of the study

The main purpose of the study is to find out how much students can do with the guesswork and to help them improve the skill of guessing the meanings of unknown words from context

The study only focuses on non-English 10th graders at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School, Hai Duong, so the results of the study are not applied for all students at the school

5 Significance of the study

Guessing the meanings of unknown words from context has been approved by many researchers as an effective strategy in improving learners’ vocabulary However, there has been little practical attempt in applying this strategy to classrooms due to the ignorance of both teachers as well as learners of its advantages For that reason, it is hoped that this study will provide both theoretical and practical foundation for the teachers and learners to make use

of this strategy while teaching and learning the reading skill Furthermore, this is a good chance for the teachers and learners at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School to assess the effectiveness of a useful strategy – the strategy for guessing the meanings of unknown words from context Hopefully, this strategy will make students more confident when encountering new words in reading texts and motivate them to enrich their vocabulary knowledge

6 Methods of the study

With reference to its characteristics, this thesis can be categorized as an action research Both qualitative and quantitative methods would be employed to carry out the study The following methods were applied to collect data for this study:

Two tests were used to evaluate the students’ guessing ability before and after the training period

A survey questionnaire was specifically designed for the teachers of English to find out their opinions on the ways to teach students to guess Another questionnaire was given to the students to identify the techniques which they had used to guess

In order to get further information about the ways the students had used to guess, informal interviews with students were also conducted before and after the training period

7 Design of the study

The study consists of three main parts: Introduction, Development and Conclusion Part 1: Introduction presents the rationale, the aims of the study, the research questions, the scope of the study, the significance of the study, the methodology and the design of the study

Part 2: Development consists of Chapter one “Literature Review”, Chapter two

“Methodology” and Chapter three “Findings and Discussion”

Chapter one, “Literature Review”, aims at presenting the theoretical background for the thesis The most important notions related to guessing the meanings of unknown words from context are introduced

Chapter two, namely “Methodology”, describes the study and the methodology underlying the research This chapter provides the background information of the instruments used to collect the data, the procedure of data collection and the procedure of data analysis Chapter three, “Findings and Discussions”, presents findings and discussions on the study and some suggestions for teaching and using the guessing skill

Part 3: Conclusion restates the main points discussed in the study, some conclusions drawn from the findings, limitations of the study and suggestions for further study

PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, the author will clarify several concepts concerning the strategy of guessing the meanings of unknown words from context In addition, different issues relating to this strategy will also be presented

1.1 Definition of context

In linguistics, the term “context” is a widely used concept by many researchers; however, defining it is not as easy as it may seem A number of scholars have given some definitions for this term

As Nation and Coady (1988:102) put it, “context is also referred to as morphological, syntactic and discourse information in a given test, which can be classified and described in terms of general features” Gough (1984, as cited in Dycus, 1997) provides a similar but

clearer view of context that at a basic level, context can be seen as information and in turn, information reduces uncertainty In reading, context can be defined as information that reduces uncertainty about the elements of a text, their meanings, and the meaning of a text as a whole

Nevertheless, of the many theoretical descriptions of the elements and nature of context, Bialystok (1983, as cited in Dycus, 1997) offers a broad sense of context She proposes that context exists in relation and proportion to the reader’s implicit knowledge (intuitive and unanalyzed knowledge of the second language), other knowledge (knowledge of other languages and world knowledge), and context (linguistic and physical aspects of a text which provide clues to meaning) From this view, context is clearly not an absolute presence in a text but is created by the reader, and is therefore influenced by the reader’s linguistic and world

knowledge

Bialystok’s point of view is supported by Dycus (1997) that traditionally context and meaning were seen as a given, existing fully and completely in any properly written text, and the key to using it was linguistic knowledge This view is claimed by cognitive theorists to place too much emphasis on linear, bottom-up processing Today, different definitions of context include language knowledge and emphasize the role played by high-level knowledge sources and personal experiences It is useful to note the commonly used general distinction

between two types of context, i.e local context and global context Local context is provided

by intrasentential information while global context is given by intersentential to discourse level information and world knowledge

In short, context includes both linguistic and non-linguistic aspects Therefore, in order to derive the meaning of a word from context, learners need to utilize not only the information presented in the text but also their general knowledge of the topic discussed in the text

1.2 Guessing the meanings of unknown words from context as a technique of vocabulary teaching and learning

Learning words via guessing from context is the most important of all sources of vocabulary learning This is particular true for native speakers learning their first language It should also be true for second language learners Nagy(1997:76) argues that although second-language learners are less effective than native speakers at using context, they may have a greater need to use context The reason is that they encounter unfamiliar words quite more often than first language readers and are more expected to encounter unfamiliar meanings of words Obviously, second language learners are able and have more opportunities to learn words from context

It is claimed by Nation (2001:240) that context plays an important part in comprehending the meaning of a word At the simplest level, the unknown word may represent a familiar concept, and so a new label for that familiar concept is being learned If the concept is an unfamiliar one, then both the concept and the label need to be learned There

is plenty of experimental evidence to show learners’ difficulty with new concept Although the word form and its meaning are among the most important things to know about a word, there are many other kinds of information that can be learned from context that are important in the receptive and productive use of the word These include the part of speech of the word, its collocations, the things it can refer to and the various forms the word can take These different kinds of information are all closely related to each other and come together to enrich a learner’s knowledge of a word For example, the range of collocations that a word has helps specify its meaning; the grammatical patterns a word can take may affect its grammatical functions, its meaning and its range of collocations A very important value of context in learning vocabulary is that a variety of contexts will evoke a variety of enriching instantiations

Pair-associated learning is not likely to do this Each paired-associate repetition is likely to strengthen but not enrich There is experimental evidence to show that providing a sentence context or several contexts, as well as a definition, helps word learning Gipe and Arnold (1979, as cited in Nation, 2001:241) find contexts and definitions to be superior to synonyms

or short definitions, a classification task or using the dictionary

Nagy(1997:76) provides a clearer view on types of knowledge that readers possess in order to contribute to contextual inference He distinguishes three types of knowledge: linguistic knowledge, world knowledge, and strategic knowledge

Firstly, he claims that much of the information provided by context lies in the linguistic structure of the context, and its use can depend on the reader’s knowledge of the structure Linguistic knowledge includes syntactic knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and word schema, which is knowledge of what constitutes possible word meanings in a language The meaning of a word determines its syntactic behavior, and in turn the syntactic behavior of

a word provides crucial information about its meaning That is why second language learners can use parts of speech as a clue to the meaning of the unknown words Another type of linguistic knowledge contributing to inferring word meanings from context is constraints on possible word meanings There is evidence that both children and adults have some sense of what constitutes a possible, or at least plausible, word meaning

A second category of knowledge that contributes to effective use of context is world knowledge The context that enables a person to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar word must

be construed to consist of the person’s knowledge of the world In some cases, learning a word from context simply requires determining which of the several already familiar concepts the word refers to In other cases, one may acquire a new concept in the process of learning the word which labels it

Strategic knowledge is the third category contributing to effective use of context It involves conscious control over cognitive resources Nagy points out that training students in the use of context has enhanced students’ ability to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words This conclusion is based on results of several studies of both first and second language learners The results of such studies make it clear that the process of using information from context is at least partially amenable to conscious control and offers some promise that

students’ ability to make use of contextual information can be enhanced through instruction The success of these studies highlights the potential efficiency of focusing on strategic knowledge as strategic knowledge promises large gains in learning from a relatively short investment of instructional time Research on comprehension strategies also contributes to the idea that strategy instruction can be applied to teaching word-learning strategies

Furthermore, Nation (2001:233) asserts that the proportion of unknown words that can

be guessed from context depends on a number of factors A critical factor in successful guessing is the number of unknown words in a text The optimal ratio of unknown to known running words, according to Liu and Nation (1985), is two percent coverage, which means one unknown words in every fifty running words Studies which use higher densities of unknown words have shown little successful guessing Secondly, the estimates of guessing need to be based on the actual words not known by each learner This means that the choice of words to

be examined needs to take account of actual learner knowledge and cannot rely on teacher intuition or the unsystematic choice of words from a text If the choice of words is carried out properly, then more readily generalizable statements about the percentage of text coverage and chances of guessing, or vocabulary size and the chances of guessing can be made Thirdly, learner skill is also an important factor in guessing If learners develop the skill of guessing, they can guess large numbers of words effectively Fourthly, learners must be given credit for guesses that are not 100 percent correct but which make a small but positive contribution to knowledge of the meaning of the word Learning by guessing from context is a cumulative procedure by which learners gradually develop their knowledge of words It is likely that the initial meetings with a word in context simply give rise to a vague knowledge of the form of the word and the awareness that it is unfamiliar and thus should get some attention next time it occurs Finally, in discussion of learning from context, it is important to distinguish between guessing from natural contexts and deliberate learning with specially constructed or chosen contexts

In conclusion, acquiring vocabulary knowledge from context requires both linguistic and extra linguistic knowledge Guessing the meaning of a word from context involves a relationship between the situation model and the text model, as well as knowledge of the nature of the possible mappings between these two things Moreover, there are a number of

factors which impinge on the effectiveness of the guessing process that researchers should take into consideration before conducting any study on this strategy

1.3 Some previous studies on guessing the meanings of unknown words from contexts

Being one of the most important strategies in acquiring vocabulary knowledge, the guessing strategy has been a great concern of many researchers Many studies have been carried out and the results have been expressed in both optimistic and pessimistic views

Seibert (1945, as cited in Nation, 2001:235) “found high rate of success (around 70 percent) in intensive guessing with learners who knew French guessing Spanish words in context Obviously, the similarities between these two closely related languages helped the guessing” Liu and Nation (1985:40) studied learners’ ability to guess the meaning of

nonsense words used to replace real words at regular intervals in written texts They found that success depended on the relative density of unknown words Where there was only one nonsense word per twenty-five words, they were easier to guess than when there was one every ten words Liu and Nation estimated that at least 85 percent of unknown words could be guessed by a class of learners working together to pool their relevant knowledge and skills Parry’s (1991, as cited in Nation, 2001:235) longitudinal study of four adult learners guessing from context supports earlier non-native speaker studies in showing reasonable success in guessing from context: a range of 12 percent to 33 percent of guesses classified as correct and a range of 51 percent to 69 percent of guesses either partly correct or correct Most words found to be unknown were not particularly subject-matter related but were in the register of formal expository prose

However, much research has shown large amounts of unsuccessful guessing from context Bensoussan and Laufer (1984:29) set a guessing task which learners responded to in writing and then analyzed how correct the guesses were The general finding is that learners very frequently made wrong guesses - if in fact they guessed at all Wrong guesses resulted from giving the wrong meaning of a word that had several meanings, translating the individual morphemes of a word, mistranslating an idiom, and confusing the target word with one that looked or sounded similar More generally, learners have been found to make guesses on some narrow basis, producing an inferred meaning that has little relation to the wider context of the text One point needs to be made here is that the study was carried out with learners who had

been specifically trained to do lexical guessing Another research procedure, adopted by Haastrup (1987, 1991), was to form pairs of learners matched according to their proficiency in the foreign language The learners worked together to infer the meaning of unknown words, thus producing introspective "think-aloud" accounts of their reasoning processes Haastrup, whose subjects were Danish secondary students learning English, analyzed the clues they used into three categories: interlingual, intralingual, and contextual She noted that many of the introspective accounts were incomplete or difficult to interpret, and so about half of the subjects were also interviewed individually as soon as they had completed the guessing task in order to clarify what they had said

There are some explanations for the poor results of these studies Nation (2001:236)

states that the poor results “may be partly due to poor design, but it is also the effect of the cumulative nature of such learning involving only small gains per meeting for most words ”

Additionally, Xiaolong’s (1988) research suggests that those learners who are good at word inference also retain the first-encounter contextual meaning of the target words better He concludes that there is a link between recalling words and the contexts in which they were learnt Dycus (1997) claims that different types of context have different influences on the guessing effects He proposes that guessing using local context is superior to guessing using global context Because of this, he believes that we should only encourage guessing if clues are in the immediate context, but that we should also teach when not to guess Accordingly, if guessing requires global context, the guessing strategy should be abandoned and the dictionary

or other resources should be used instead Another researcher, Honeyfield (1977), also stresses the importance of context by arguing that even with a functional vocabulary of the three thousand most frequently occurring items in English, learners will still not know around 20 percent of the items they encounter in an unsimplified text The problem confronting both teacher and learners is that no course can provide learners with anything like the vocabulary they will need to comprehend authentic texts He emphasized that it is, therefore, of importance to equip students with strategies for inferring the meaning of unknown vocabulary from the context in which it occurs rather than getting them to undertake the time-consuming task of memorising long list of words or looking up unknown words in a dictionary which would make the reading process unbearably slow and tedious

From the above discussion, we can see that the success of the studies on guessing the meanings of unknown words from context depends on a number of factors including the learners, the teacher’s preparation and the situation where the study is conducted More importantly, given the evidence that many learners lack the skill to infer the meaning of unknown words correctly, there has been surprisingly little research on whether they can be successful trained to apply it in their process of vocabulary acquisition

1.4 Guessing strategies

Numerous teachers and researchers advocate teaching students to use a general strategy for dealing with unknown words in text Perhaps the most well known strategy is one described by Clarke and Nation (1980:212) which includes four main steps as follows:

Step 1: Look at the unknown word and decide its part of speech Is it a noun, a verb, an adjective, or an adverb?

Step 2: Look at the clause or sentence containing the unknown word If the unknown word is a noun, what does this noun do, or what is done to it? And what adjectives describe it? What verb is it near? If it is a verb, what nouns does it go with? Is it modified by an adverb? If

it is an adjective, what noun does it go with? If it is an adverb, what verb is it modifying? Step 3: Look at the relationship between the clause or sentence containing the unknown word and other sentences or paragraphs Sometimes this relationship will be

signaled by conjunctions like but, because, if, when, or by adverbs like however or as a result

The possible types of relationship include cause and effect, contrast, time, exemplification, and summary

Step 4: Use the knowledge you have gained from steps 1 to 3 to guess the meaning of the word and check if your guess is correct

(a) See that the part of speech of your guess is the same as the part of speech of the unknown word If it is not the same, then something is wrong with your guess

(b) Break the unknown word into its prefix, root, and suffix, if possible If the meanings of the prefix and root correspond to your guess, it is good If not, look at your guess again, but do not change anything if you feel reasonably certain about your guess

(c) Replace the unknown word with your guess If the sentence makes sense, your guess is probably correct

Williams (1985, as cited in Walters, 2004:245) proposes a similar strategy and suggests teaching the strategy explicitly, using “marked-up” texts at first, to show the source

of contextual information, moving on to unmarked texts as students become familiar with the strategy

Bruton and Samuda (1981, as cited in Nation, 2001:259) also propose guiding students through a deductive procedure, which differs from Clarke and Nation’s (1980:212) in that the step of guessing occurs early in the strategy simply reflects and accommodates the reader’s irresistible urge to guess, an urge that is postponed in Clarke and Nation’s strategy

Gairns and Redman (1986:83) use the term “contextual guesswork” for the strategy of making use of context in which the word appears to derive an idea of its meaning or in some cases to guess from the word itself They claim that speakers of European and non-European languages alike can make use of their previous knowledge of English to guess the meanings of unknown words They give two examples:

(a) I overslept this morning

(b) My work varies from week to week

In the first example, the unknown word consists of parts which are already familiar and the

learner might have met the same prefix “over” in other words (e.g overtime) This knowledge

enables the learners to work out the meaning In the second example, with their knowledge of

the common noun “variety”, it is sufficient for the learners to deduce the meaning of “varies”

and understand the sentence

In order to make the students focus on the text to develop the ability to guess from context, various classroom activities can be devised from using the substitution of a nonsense word for a particular item to approaching denser texts in which a wider context needs to be understood before the meaning of a single item surfaces Let’s consider the following two examples:

(a) Can you turn the zong on, it’s cold in here?

(b) The newspaper has suffered during the past year because advertising money has fallen by ten percent However, this fall has been offset by increasing the price of the paper from 20 pence to 22 pence

In example (a), students are able to guess that “zong” is some sort of heater because of the word “cold” And in (b), they need to understand the discourse markers, “however” in this

case, to deduce meaning

The above discussed strategies have the advantage of having been designed with students in mind so that they are relatively simple and easy to follow and to remember A much more complicated strategy is one described by van Parreren and Schouten van Parreren (1981, as cited in Nation, 2001:257), who suggest that the student must learn a framework appropriate for guessing – four linguistic levels (syntactic, semantic, lexical and stylistic) and three phases of action (orient, execute and test), as well as how to estimate at which level to begin (rather than going through each level in turn) and to judge the correctness of this estimate This strategy is relatively complex, and it is difficult to imagine how it could be easily taught to students

To conclude, the strategies discussed above are precious resources for teachers to use

to train their students Each strategy has its own advantages It seems that the strategy suggested by Clarke and Nation (1980) is the clearest and the most suitable for high school students

1.5 Learner-strategy training

The ability to guess the meanings of unknown words from context is clearly a valuable skill, so it is advisable that this strategy is fully exploited in class It should be remembered, though, that there are students for whom contextual guesswork is an obvious strategy and one that does not require a lot of time spent on it Other students may have considerable difficulty with this type of task and would need to have the skill developed more gradually This leaves the teacher with the problem that this strategy is introduced and applied in the classroom in a flexible way In developing the basic skill of guessing, Twaddell (1980, as cited in Yang,

2000:22) recommends that students practise while guided “It is the teacher’s task to organize the teaching so as to facilitate this development Teachers should accept a certain amount of

vagueness in guessing the meanings of words by students The teacher should not expect students to come up with exact meanings while guessing in this manner Teachers should also help students to realize that

“through successive encounters with a word and successive guessing in context after context, we sooner or later learn more and more precisely the meanings of the once unfamiliar word By the time we have encountered a word often enough, the accumulated exclusions have subtracted enough from the vagueness, and the associations of the word with its meanings have become increasingly precise”

(Twaddell, 1980, as cited in Yang, 2000:22)

This view is supported by Nation (2001:234) that learners must be confident in their guesses which are not 100 percent correct The successive encounters with a word make positive contribution to knowledge of the meaning of the word

According to Gairns and Redman (1986:84), “it is important that contextual guesswork

is not introduced into the lesson at a time when other skills are being developed” Classroom

cassette recorders are useful devices for students to rewind and focus on a particular word or phrase, but this is not a facility that is available in real situations where time spent deciding the meaning of a single item probably results in the listener missing the next three sentences In these situations, attention to detail can reinforce certain students’ obsession with understanding every word and have a detrimental effect on global understanding The same is true of written texts Lengthy deliberations on a single item will interfere with the development of the skill of “gist” reading They also claim that students should not be asked to guess the meaning from context when the context is wholly inadequate to the task With observation it is all too easy to see how the context illuminates the meaning of the target item; from a position of ignorance it is not always that simple This is particularly true if the target item is surrounded by additional items which may be unknown or only partially known to the students

Since a contextual way of learning and expanding vocabulary is possible, we need to know how to train students in this skill Clarke and Nation (1980:212) gives a very good strategy including four main steps on how to guess unknown words, which was described in the previous part However, readers must have clues in order to infer meaning from context If the context does not provide enough clues, inference is impossible Both teachers and students need to be aware of this And below are some clues that Nation (1983:89) suggests students learn to watch for

practice in this technique by preparing specific exercises such as sentences containing nonsense words

Additionally, students should take notice of the various types of definition clues Among these are the parentheses and footnotes, which are the most obvious definition clues

The meaning of a word can be explained in parentheses For example: “We have adopted the view that every sentence can be described as a string (sequence) of constituents.” Students can

do exercises like drawing a line under the words in parentheses or giving the meaning of the

word that comes before the parentheses

Most students enjoy learning words with similar and opposite meanings The task is to get learners to recognize the definitional role these synonyms and antonyms often play

Students can learn that an unfamiliar word is often defined in a sentence using be and a synonym For instance: “a birthday party is an observance, that is, a remembrance of

someone’s day of birth.”

(2) Inference clues

Inference clues require a higher level of analytical skill and practice than the previous types For these types of clues, the same method of practice-recognizing elements and

obtaining meaning from the elements can be used

The meanings of the words can be inferred from examples, often by using physical

clues such as “i.e.”, “e.g.”, and “for example” Look at the following sample sentence:

“Iran is trying to restore many of its ancient monuments; Persepolis, for example, is

being partly rebuilt by a group of Italian experts.”

By using the sum of the information in a sentence or paragraph, students can

understand an unfamiliar word Here are four examples:

(a) Many products are sold to stop perspiration This wetness comes from our body whenever we are too warm, work very hard, or are afraid, and it usually doesn’t smell very

good (With a physical cue) (b) He’s a really good athlete He plays sports well (Without a physical cue) (c) He’s bound to win He can’t lose (Opposite meaning)

(d) The forsythia was covered with the golden flowers that bloom early in the spring (Information given)

Readers can infer meanings of words by recalling similar situations or experiences and

by making the appropriate inferences For instance, “The patient was 85 years old and

suffering from arthritis He moved forward slowly, taking short, shuffling steps.”

Learners can often guess a word because it causes a result, or it is the result caused by

something described in the text Here is one example “The conflagration was so fierce that within just a few seconds one could see towering flames where the house had stood, and the

smoke, which filled the sky, could be seen for miles around.”

Sometimes learners can guess the meaning of a word by an explanation or a

description given in the same sentence or paragraph: “The soldier was filled with intense remorse when he saw the terrible injuries suffered by people hit by the bomb his plane had dropped He was ashamed to look at the bleeding and broken bodies as they were carried into

the hospital He cried and moaned when he saw that one was just a small child.”

Students can learn a definition through the association between an object and its

function or purpose for use: “The scientist removed the treatise from the shelf and began to

read.”

Many English words are formed using prefixes and suffixes Teaching these meanings can help students decipher meanings of unknown words by analyzing the word’s structure

Students can also practise forming words by using suffixes and prefixes

Honeyfield (1977) describes three types of exercises that can be used to help students develop the skill of guessing the meanings of unknown words from context In addition to the use of teacher-guided cloze exercises, in which words are deleted from a text and words-in-

context exercises, in which learners encounter target vocabulary items in the meaningful context of a continuous text and use the surrounding context to arrive at the meaning through focused discussion, he suggests context enrichment exercises, in which students are presented with a succession of sentences, each with the same unknown word, each containing progressively more information He gives the following example:

(a) We had a whoosis

A tropical fish, an egg beater or a leather suitcase?

(b) We had a whoosis, but the handle broke

A tropical fish, an egg beater or a leather suitcase?

(c) We had a whoosis, but the handle broke, so we had to beat the egg with a fork

A tropical fish, an egg beater or a leather suitcase?

The purpose of this kind of exercise is to increase students’ awareness of how far useful context can extend from the unknown word and to encourage the learner to use wider context

to arrive at the meanings of unknown words This exercise would seem most useful if it employed authentic text, as opposed to invented contexts

In summary, training students to guess the meanings of unknown words from context

is a complicated and cumulative procedure Therefore, teachers should be patient and choose suitable exercises for students to practice so as to be able to use this valuable strategy

Chapter summary:

In this chapter of literature review, the writer has presented different basic issues relating to the strategy of guessing the meanings of unknown words from context, which set the theoretical background for the current study Previous studies on this issue have been reviewed To serve the aim of the study, the writer has also paid attention to learner-strategy training In the next chapter, the writer reports the study for the answers to the proposed research questions

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, methods of the study will be described clearly, including the research setting and participants, important steps the researcher followed in conducting the study, the materials she used at each step and the data analysis procedure

This action research project consists of three main stages: Pre – Improvement stage, Trying – out stage and Post – Improvement stage These stages are suggested by Tsui (1993)

2.1 The setting of the study and participants

2.1.1 The school

The context of the study is Nguyen Trai Gifted High School, which is the only gifted high school in Hai Duong Concerning the school’s facilities for English teaching and learning, there are some major advantages First, the class size is quite small in comparison with that in other schools in the province Each class consists of around 30 students, which

is not very difficult for teachers to conduct communicative activities in class Moreover, the teaching equipment is modern and convenient; therefore, teachers can apply the electronic lessons to the extent that they desire for With the above condition, it can be said that the teachers and students are offered a convenient and modern environment for their teaching and learning English

2.1.2 Participants

The subjects chosen for the research include 59 grade 10th non-major English students

in class 10H and 10 D of Nguyen Trai High School, Hai Duong The teacher-researcher has been in charge of these two groups since they moved to their high school study A striking feature of these two groups is that they are all non-major English students They all admitted that they had studied English for at least four years The textbook they are studying is English

10 for non-major English students promulgated by the Ministry of Education and Training Ten teachers who are currently teaching English at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School were also chosen to answer the questionnaire for teachers The teachers’ ages range from 25 to

48 Their experience of teaching English varies from three years to twenty six years The research was carried out during the second term of the academic year 2010 – 2011 at Nguyen Trai High School

2.2 Three main stages of the action research 2.2.1 Pre – Improvement stage

Step 1: Identifying the problem

The action research is carried out with the aim of finding: “The effectiveness of guessing the meanings of unknown words by non-English 10 th graders at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School, Hai Duong” While working as a teacher at this school, the author realizes that

when encountering a new word, students often look up the meaning of a new word in a bilingual dictionary or ask their teacher for its meaning They rarely utilize critical thinking to detect its meaning This not only slows down the learning process but also makes students dependent on bilingual dictionaries and their teachers Here, a question is raised that whether these students can be trained to use the guessing strategies to improve their ability to guess word meanings from context as well as their competence of acquiring new vocabulary To find the answer to this question, the researcher conduct an action research project with 59 students from two groups, 10H and 10D, at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School in five weeks during the second semester of the academic year 2010 – 2011

2.2.1.1 Giving a pre-test to evaluate students’ guessing ability

In order to identify students’ guessing ability before training, the researcher gave a text

as a pre-test (Appendix A) for students to list out the words they did not know and then to try

to guess their meanings To ensure the reliability and validity of the test, the text is chosen from the book “Revision and Examination English 10” for students of grade 10 published by Education Publishing House The text is about “Motion pictures”, which belongs to one of the sixteen topics that students learn at grade 10 There are 168 words in the text The text was printed in a piece of paper and delivered to the students The students did the task in twenty minutes, and after that the teacher-researcher collected the pieces of paper to get the results After collecting the pieces of paper from the students, the teacher-researcher counted the unknown words that the students had listed out The researcher added all the words and took the average number from 59 lists

2.2.1.2 Conducting an informal interview about the way the students guessed

In order to get further information about students’ ability of guessing the meaning of unknown words from context, the teacher-researcher carried out an informal interview about

the way the students guessed Three students from the two groups were selected randomly by

the researcher after the pre-test to answer the question: “How did you guess the meaning of the unknown words in the text?” The interview was conducted in Vietnamese so that the

participants could fully articulate their views without being constrained by the use of a second language The interview was recorded and then transcribed, translated and analysed by the author

Step 2: Finding causes of the problem 2.2.1.3 Consulting with colleagues

In order to get more professional advice, suggestions and ideas about helping students improve the skill of guessing the meanings of unknown words from context the author delivered a questionnaire for 10 English teachers who are teaching in the English Division at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School to answer

Five questions were chosen for the teachers of English in the English Division at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School to answer on a piece of paper (Appendix B) After that, the author collected all the pieces of paper and got the results

2.2.1.4 Reading professional books/ journals for ideas and suggestions

After consulting with other teachers, the author decided to find more information about training students to guess the meanings of unknown words from context in the professional books or journals The researcher found a number of guessing strategies suggested by scholars all over the world The strategies were presented in chapter one in this Minor Thesis Paper (from page 10 to page 12) Among the strategies, the strategy suggested by Clarke and Nation (1980:212) seems to be the most suitable for high school students Therefore, the author chose this strategy to introduce to the students and train them to guess the meanings of unknown words from context

2.2.2 Trying – out stage

Step 3: Designing strategies for improvements

From the comments, ideas and suggestions from the students, the colleagues, professional books or journals and the author’s own teaching experience, the author of this thesis planned to train the students in three lessons in three weeks to improve the problem Each lesson lasted 90 minutes The lessons were designed as follows

Lesson 1: (Appendix C)

There were two main parts in this lesson

- Firstly, in the theory part, the teacher-researcher presented the guessing strategy suggested by Clarke and Nation (1980:212) The strategy consists of four steps and the teacher demonstrated the steps to the learners, using the examples prepared in advance

- Secondly, the practice part included two exercises On doing these exercises, the students could apply what they had learnt in the theoretical section, especially step one and step three In exercise 1, the students were required to identify the part of speech of the underlined words Exercise 2 asked the students to predict the positive or negative value of an unknown word basing on the conjunctions before choosing an appropriate meaning for the unknown word This technique was presented in step three

Lesson 2: (Appendix D)

This lesson consisted of two exercises

- In exercise 1, the teacher gave the students two nonsense words Each of the nonsense words appears several times in a paragraph The students tried to guess the meaning

of the nonsense words using Clarke and Nation’s (1980) strategy The teacher guided the students to guess the first word in detail The teacher called on different learners to do each step Then they worked in groups to detect the meaning of the second word

- In exercise 2, there were five questions Each question consisted of an unknown word The unknown word appeared in several sentences in different contexts Different contexts made the situation easier for the students to guess the word’s meaning

Step 4: Trying out strategies and making notes on what happened in the class

The guessing strategy and changes were tried out in three weeks during the second semester of the academic year 2010 – 2011 in two groups, 10H and 10D, at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School All the changes and improvements or even new or bad problems after each lesson were recorded by the teacher in brief notes

Lesson 1:

- The students were aware of the guessing strategy, which meant they knew the professional method to guess the meanings of unknown words instead of guessing basing merely on their own experience The steps were presented clearly by the teacher; therefore, the students found it quite easy to follow

- In the practice part, the students proved to be confident in fulfilling the exercises It is partly because the exercises were simple for them They were not asked to guess the meanings

of unknown words at once but only to practise the guessing strategy step by step As a result, the students were motivated, and most of their answers were correct

Lesson 2:

- In the first exercise, the students were curious to find out what the nonsense words actually meant On dealing with the first nonsense word, many students volunteered to do the first three steps and most of them got correct answers When being asked to guess the meaning

of the nonsense word, they gave some incorrect suggestions such as “a credit card” or “a passport” However, in the end, they managed to give the correct answer: “a visa” When

working out the meaning of the second nonsense word, the students worked in groups of four

students They discussed eagerly and most of the groups detected the correct answer, “a map”

- In exercise 2, the students also worked hard, and most of them could find the correct meanings of the unknown words although they could say their meanings mostly in Vietnamese Only a few of them could express the meanings in English This is because the students’ level

of proficiency is rather low Nevertheless, the students were motivated by the guessing techniques and they knew how to make use of the context to derive word meanings

Lesson 3:

In this lesson, the students were required to do a more complicated task than they had done in the previous lessons With the help of the exercise format, the students listed out the

words in the passage that they did not know and they could follow the steps of the guessing strategy easily It took the students twenty minutes to guess the unknown words After that, the teacher asked different students to report their results and she checked the results in detail

It was recorded that some of the guesses were correct while some were incorrect

2.2.3 Post – Improvement stage

Step 5: Evaluating the try – out 2.2.3.1 Giving a post-test to evaluate the students’ improvement

In order to identify the students’ guessing ability after the training period, the researcher gave a text as a post-test (Appendix F) for the students to make a list of the words they did not know and then to try to guess their meanings To ensure that the post-test is at the same level as the pre-test, the text is also chosen from the book “Revision and Examination English 10” for students of grade 10 published by Education Publishing House The text is about “Dolphins”, which belongs to one of the sixteen topics that students learn at grade 10 There are 248 words in the text, which means the text in the post-test is longer than that in the pre-test The text was printed in a piece of paper and delivered to the students The students did the task in twenty minutes, and after that the teacher-researcher collected the pieces of paper to get the results After collecting the pieces of paper from the students, the teacher-researcher counted the number of the unknown words that students had listed out The researcher added all the words and took the average number from 59 lists

2.2.3.2 Designing a questionnaire for students to identify the techniques that they have used to guess the meanings of unknown words

After the post-test, a questionnaire was provided for the students There were three parts

in the questionnaire

In the first part of the questionnaire, there were ten statements relating to the guessing strategy and the students confirmed the techniques they used in order to derive the word

meanings by indicating “True” or “False”

In the second part of the questionnaire, the students were required to show their point of view on the effectiveness of the guessing techniques The data were analysed in the unit of percentage as follows

In the last part of the questionnaire, the students were asked to confirmed whether their ability to guess had been improved or not after the training period

2.3.3 Conducting an informal interview to identify the changes

The teacher-researcher carried out an informal interview in order to investigate the changes more thoroughly Nine students from the two groups were selected by the researcher

to answer some questions Question 1 was the same as the question given in step 1 and it was answered by the same students as those in step 1 Other questions were answered by the students chosen randomly All the interviews were conducted in Vietnamese so that the participants could fully articulate their views without being constrained by the use of a second language The interviews were recorded and then transcribed, translated and analysed by the author Following were the questions for the interview:

Question 1: How did you guess the meanings of the unknown words in the text?

Question 2: How effective is guessing the meanings of unknown words from context? Question 3: How can you apply the guessing strategy to your learning process?

2.3 Data analysis procedure

During this data analysis process, content analysis was used as the key method both to gather and investigate data After the data had been collected, mechanical counting was performed to render specific statistics These numbers were put in appropriate tables, charts and graphs for better illustration and explanations

Moreover, content analysis became helpful when the researcher analyzed data from the observations and interviews The students’ facial expressions and their reaction in class were also taken into consideration It was difficult for the researcher to illustrate this type of information into charts and tables; instead, the researcher often quoted and interpreted the participants’ ideas to support the point Consequently, results from the data collection instruments helped completely give answers to all research questions

Chapter summary

This chapter presented an overview on the situation of teaching and learning English at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School, the data collection procedure and the data analysis procedure In the next chapter, the author presented the findings and discussions on helping

the students to develop their guessing skill

CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS

In the previous chapter, details of the research procedure were described In this chapter, findings of the study are presented

3.1 The results of the instruments before the training period

Before the training period the author conducted a pre-test, an interview to explore the way the students guessed and a questionnaire to get advice from the English teachers at her school Following are the results of these instruments

3.1.1 The results of the pre-test

There are 7.8 words that students did not know, which makes up 4.6 percent of the total number of the words in the text This means that there are 95.4 percent of the words in the text that students had already known, which, according to Liu and Nation (1985), is an ideal condition for guessing to happen Here are the results of the pre-test

Chart 1: The pre-test results

As can be seen from chart 1, the students performed poorly in the pre-test They were able to guess only a small percentage (12.8%) of the unknown words though the number of unknown words was only 7.8 and the topic of the text was familiar to them (it is one of the topics they learn in grade 10) Most of the guesses, 46.2% per 59%, were incorrect More disappointedly, the students were not capable of guessing 41% of the unknown words Obviously, the results of the pre-test were not satisfactory, which proves that the students’

Words students could not guess

skill of guessing the meanings of unknown words from context was poor Having observed the students’ performance on the pre-test day, the researcher noticed that the students were confused about dealing with unknown words without a bilingual dictionary or an informant It was difficult for them to understand the content of the text because they did not know the exact meanings of the new words This suggests that unknown words became an obstacle for the students when reading without a dictionary The researcher does not deny the role of dictionaries, but relying too much on dictionaries or other sources for the meaning of unknown words in order to understand the messages from the texts is not advisable The question is how the students can survive with longer texts or in difficult situations such as in examinations Hence, it is essential that the students be trained in the skills of guessing the meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary items from context and encouraged to use them regularly

3.1.2 The results of the interview

The following are the students’ answers when being asked: “How did you guess the meaning of the unknown words in the text?” after the pre-test

Student 1: I guessed the meanings of the unknown words basing on the meanings of

the known words and the parts of speech of the unknown words

Student 2: I guessed the meanings of the unknown words basing on the meanings of

the known words, the meanings of the sentences that contain the unknown words and the meaning of the whole text

Student 3: I guessed the meanings of the unknown words basing on the meanings of

the sentences surrounding the new words and the meaning of the whole text I also based on the forms of the unknown words, especially affixes

The results of the interview give a clearer view of the students’ ability of guessing the meanings of unknown words It seems that they had already realized the importance of the guessing skill, but they did not know how to do it They reacted simultaneously towards the task that their teacher asked them to do They had a vague concept of guessing from context in their mind The students knew the role of context and used the context for their guessing; however, the use of context was not as effective as expected Moreover, the students took notice of the information about the unknown words such as the parts of speech and the forms

of the words Identifying the parts of speech of the unknown words proves to be useful for the