iii 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
ability of fifty-nine non-English 10
th
graders at Nguyen Trai Gifted High School, Hai
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.
iv
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
EFL: English as a Foreign Language
ELT: English Language Teaching


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
Step 1: Identifying the problem ……………………………………………………….…18


2. Conclusions …………………………………………………………………… …… 39
3. Limitations of the study …………………………………………………………… 39
4. Suggestions for further research ………………… ……………………………… 40

vii
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
1
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

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 10
th
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. 3
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.

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

5
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

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

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

8
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

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.

10
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

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.

12
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,

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.

14
(1). Structural clues
We use structural clues to determine the type or grammatical category of the new word.
This tells us the kind of meaning to infer or look for. For example, if students are told that
“kneaf” is a verb, then the sequence, “the sploony urdle kneafed” will begin to make structural
sense. Learners know that either “sploony” or “urdle” must be a noun, since their grammar
knowledge tells them that a gap between “the” and a verb must be filled by a noun. Their
morphological knowledge will tell them that “sploony” is probably an adjective, and if it is a
noun, “urdle” may be another noun or an adverb. The teacher can provide students with
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.

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-

16
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

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 10
th
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. 18
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

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.

20
Lesson 1: (Appendix C)