Employing Context Clues and Students’ Word Recognition Skills

Ni Andres Bonifacio

One’s ability to make sense of words is a springboard to meaningful verbal communication. As there exists interdependency between word recognition and comprehension, fluency and achievement (Bromley, 2007), so much depends on our role as English teachers to bridge any gap hounding a student’s ability to identify the meaning of an unknown word. This accountability and the observed occurrence of unsatisfactory level of word recognition of our students motivated the completion of this research. This study aimed to investigate the efficiency of different context clues – direct definition, synonym, antonym and example clues – in expanding the students’ word recognition skills. A 40-item multiple-choice pretest challenging the students to select the correct definition of words provided without clues and a 40-item multiple-choice posttest challenging the students to select the correct definitions of the words provided with context clues this time have been used to gather the necessary data which were analyzed by getting the mean scores of the students and the difference between scores of the students in two tests.The pretest results revealed that the students accumulated a low score in items under direct definition clues and average in items under synonym, antonym and example clues. Overall, the students got an average score of 15.93 over 40 (39.85%) with the descriptive equivalent “Average.” When the clues were finally placed around the same words in the post-test, a significant improvement has been documented. In items under all clues, the students recorded scores with descriptive equivalent “High” and accumulated an overall average score of 34.44 over 40 (86.10%) or High. In general, after employing context clues, the students accumulated a gain of 18.51 points or a 46.45% increase which is considered a positive gain. The results imply that the use of context clues can be of great help in aiding the students to correctly identify/form the definition of an unknown word. It is therefore recommended that teachers should refrain from presenting an unknown word, during discussions, for the students to define in isolation. The use of context clues in written or spoken texts should be encouraged.

INTRODUCTION

Ni Jose Rizal 

Words are basically a precursor to any form of verbal communication. Without the ability to correctly understand and use words, effective communication is rather impossible (Hibbard, 2009). Bromley (2007, p. 536) further described vocabulary as “a principal contributor to comprehension, fluency and achievement.” In addition, Allen (1998) in Hibbard (2009) postulated that at the core of an individual’s ability to construct meaning is his ability to recognize words automatically. As English student teachers at F. Bangoy National High School, this basic fact alarmed our team after our everyday observations revealed that the ability of most of our students to form or identify the definitions of unknown words they encounter is noticeably unsatisfactory. Whenever our students encounter new words or are asked to define certain words that come up amidst discussion, a poor or no answer at all is returned. This problem was idenitified after we undertook a round-table discussion where inputs were mostly sourced from the daily journal entries that each of us has compiled since the start of the course after several talks that we held with our cooperating teachers.

Furthermore, our team found out that this issue may have interefered with their performance in certain activities such as understanding literary texts, answering comprehension questions and other activities that require proper understanding of every bit of information provided. Moller, Ketsman, & Masmaliyeva (2009) wrote in their research The Essentials of Vocabulary Teaching: From Theory to Practice that there is “power” in being fully acquainted with words as these serve as building blocks to learning. With this being true, conversely, the lack of ability to automatically recognize words in terms of meaning is “weakness” or “powerlessness” and may bar a person from learning fully and meaningfully.

We sought to accomplish this research to address this issue by invesitagating the potential of employing context clues in exapanding the students’ word recognition skills and helping them respod correctly when asked to identify an unkown word’s defintion.

To borrow from Pikulski (2007), word recognition is the p