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