Guessing the Meanings of Words From Context: Why and How

Vocabulary is an indispensable part of a language. It is vitally needed to express meaning. Teaching English vocabulary, an important field in language teaching, is worthy of effort. In order our students to acquire reading, listening, speaking and writing skills we need to help students with developing their vocabulary knowledge. Vocabulary learning is essential to the development of language skills. Recently the importance of vocabulary learning and teaching has been considerably emphasized. One of the most effective ways of vocabulary learning is guessing the meanings of words from context. The purpose of this study is to show why guessing the meaning of unknown words from context clues is a very important learning strategy and how it is done efficiently.