The Concept of Contextual Guessing Strategy

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3. Contextual Guessing Strategy

In order to have clear insights about contextual guessing strategy, the researcher provides further explanation on the concept of contextual guessing strategy, the types of context clues, the procedures in applying contextual guessing strategy, and the factors affecting contextual guessing.

a. The Concept of Contextual Guessing Strategy

Honeyfield 1977 as cited by Nunan 1991 emphasized that a context is important in learning vocabulary. Still from Honeyfield, he conveyed that it is more beneficial to provide learners with strategies for drawing the meaning of an unfamiliar word from the context in which it occurs, instead of asking the learners to memorize long lists of words or to look up the word in a dictionary which sometimes disturbs the reading process. Moreover, Kruse 1979 as cited by Ying 2001 revealed that learning words in context than in isolation is considered as an effective vocabulary learning strategy. Ying 2001 stated that a word used in different context may have different meaning. For that reason, recognizing the context in which the word occurs is able to assist the students to fully understand the meaning of words. One of the vocabulary learning strategies which deal with the importance of context is contextual guessing strategy. According to Gorjian, Hayati, Sheykhiani 2008, contextual guessing strategy is defined as a strategy to discover the meaning of unknown words or to identify the meaning of important words using their context. Furthermore, this strategy can be defined as an attempt to arrive at the meaning of an unfamiliar word in the meaningful context PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 23 Honeyfield, 1977; cited in Nunan, 1991. Decarrico 2001 said “guessing meaning from context strategy is a key vocabulary learning skill for dealing with low-frequency vocabulary, particularly in reading authentic texts.” Consequently, the availability of context was very helpful for the students in order to guess the meaning of an unknown word successfully. Na 2009 added that clues like definition, explanation, example, synonym, antonym, hyponym, relevant detail, and word structure can be used to illustrate the new words directly. Furthermore, those clues provide some related information about the meaning of the word concerned indirectly. The importance of context in learning vocabulary is also proposed by Ying 2001 who stated that context clues can help the students to comprehend the larger chunks of information found in the texts. Then, it is told that the surrounding context clues were rich with information about the unknown word. Dealing with the way of applying the strategy in vocabulary learning, Bright McGregor 1970 as cited in Nation 1990 revealed, “perhaps the most important thing of all is to remember that the ability to infer in this way is a skill that can only be acquired by practice…” From their statement, it can be concluded that by having more exposure in practicing the guessing, the students will be more skilful in applying the strategy when encountering a new word. Another idea comes from Dale O’Rouke 1971 who revealed that in learning vocabulary, learners should not learn most of the words or the new words by looking them up in the dictionary. Sometimes, learners stop reading and fail to obtain the information from their English texts when they cannot understand the meaning of PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 24 a word. When learners face this kind of situation, teacher can assist them to learn the word from its context. It can be done by recognizing partial knowledge of a word. Dale O’Rouke 1971 gave an example that learners may know the word octopus, which means an eight-legged sea creature, from Biology. They may also know the word octagon, which means an eight-sided figure, from Math. Then, when learners meet the word octave, which means a series of eight notes in music, they have already recognized that the word octo has something to do with eight. From the example above, it can be summarized that in determining the meaning of an unknown word or a new word, learners can guess the meaning of the word by seeing its context clues.

b. Types of Context Clues