Meaning Of Unknown Words Research Articles

Guessing the Meanings of Words from Context: Why and How

Vocabulary is an indispensable part of a language. It is vitally needed to define the meanings of words used in context for comprehension, clarity of expression, and purpose. Teaching English vocabulary is an important field in language teaching. It is that one ingredient that beautifies the language and makes English learning fun in many amazing ways. Moreover, in order for our students to acquire reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills we need to facilitate students learning by incorporating well-developed techniques to make them learn fast and give them a strong grip on their vocabulary knowledge.
 Vocabulary learning is essential to the development of language skills. There is a considerable emphasis on the importance of vocabulary learning and teaching. 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.

Use of Dictionaries and Online Tools for Reading by Thai EFL Learners in a Naturalistic Setting

Dictionaries and online tools are regarded as important tools for finding out the meanings of unknown words or checking the usage of interesting words. This study investigated students' use of dictionaries and online tools in a natural setting by identifying the type of words they look up in their dictionaries and the types of dictionaries they use for the look-up. Fourteen learners from a Thai public university participated as the subjects by filling in a task record form which included the names of the dictionaries they were using, look-up words, meanings selected for the words, and their parts of speech. The look-up words were analyzed to find out the frequencies of words, parts of speech, and meanings by checking with an advanced learner dictionary. The findings show that the subjects mainly selected words that were nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They tended to choose "high frequency" for the lookups. For their convenience, subjects used either an online translation tool, 'Google Translate', or bilingual dictionaries through mobile devices. The results may help us understand EFL dictionary users' behaviors in using dictionaries and provide interesting implications for language teachers.

Millennials as Dictionary Users: A Study of Dictionary Use Habits of Serbian EFL Students

The article addresses the use of dictionaries among the new millennium generation of English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduates. Applying the mixed-method approach (a questionnaire and interviews), the study examines the frequency of dictionary use, the types of dictionaries used, activities initiating dictionary consultation, information searched for, and problems faced in using dictionaries. The findings suggest that the participants are most fond of bilingual online dictionaries and use them mostly for looking up the meaning of unknown words. They also show that despite being high consumers of technology, participants do not benefit much from online dictionaries, as they neglect most of the entry information. The qualitative data reveal that the participants perceive various digital tools of questionable quality as online dictionaries. Overall, the study sheds light on the characteristic behavior of the new generation of EFL learners regarding their dictionary use and points to the necessity of developing their digital competence in the realm of dictionary use.

THE STUDENTS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS GOOGLE TRANSLATE


 
 
 Google Translate (GT) is a tool commonly used by those who learn translation in higher education. While the research on GT mostly evaluated GT through experimental design, very few studies have focused on student perceptions of GT. Hence, this research intends to investigate their students’ attitudes of GT performance. 24 students of higher education in Cimahi participated in the study. The data about students’ attitude include behavior, cognitive, and affective attitude. They were gathered through questionnaire and interview. The result revealed that in behavioral attitude, the students’ often use GT to check the meaning of unknown word and translating a sentence. Meanwhile, the cognitive attitude indicated that few students assume that GT is ethically acceptable regardless of how it is used because it is helpful in the language learning process. In the affective attitude, GT is positive because they felt like using GT in translation. Even, some of them felt helped by GT’s assistance and the other reason was GT was easy to use. In short, student’s regard GT as a useful tool in translation depending on the way how one uses the tool.
 
 

THE EFFECT OF CONTEXTUAL GUESSING STRATEGY ON IDENTIFYING THE MEANING OF LOW-FREQUENCY WORDS AND BEHAVIOURS OF TURKISH EFL STUDENTS IN IDENTIFYING THE MEANING OF UNKNOWN WORDS

This study explores the contribution of Contextual Guessing Strategy (CGS) to identify the meaning of unknown low-frequency words within the context, and to identify the habits of English language majoring students in employing CGS. The participants in this study are ninety-three male and female ELT students randomly selected. Data collection tools were a reading text and two questionnaires identifying three major areas. These are: 1. which sources students apply in the first instance to identify the meaning of unknown words, 2. which contextual clues they look for, and 3. how often these clues are employed to reveal the meaning of unknown words. 
 
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Use of morphological and contextual cues in children\u2019s lexical inferencing in L1 and L2

In an experimental design, we investigated how fifth-grade readers use morphological and contextual information to infer the meaning of unknown words, and to what extent this is related to their cognitive and linguistic skills. A group of 166 fifth-grade Dutch children (59 L1, 107 L2) performed a lexical inferencing task in which the availability of morphological and contextual information was manipulated. Readers used both morphological and contextual information in lexical inferencing. Good decoding skill was related to more use of morphological information. Reading comprehension skill was associated with the use of morphological and contextual cues. L1 and L2 readers did not differ with respect to the use of morphological information. L2 readers used contextual information less in their inferences than L1 readers did. This difference was driven by L2 readers with weak vocabulary. The use of contextual information was especially high in L1 readers with good reading comprehension skills, and especially low in L2 readers with low vocabulary. Results indicate that to access morphological information, decoding is crucial, whereas for contextual inferencing, a minimum of linguistic competence is needed, which makes it more challenging for L2 readers.

Indicators of Meanings of Unknown Words Used in a Text

Indicators of Meanings of Unknown Words Used in a Text

Lexical Inferencing Strategy Instruction and the Development of Reading Comprehension: The Case of Iranian EFL Learners

Lexical inferencing has been recognized as an effective learning strategy in SLA. The present study investigated Iranian EFL learners’ development of reading comprehension as a result of exposure to lexical inferencing strategy instruction. To do so, 45 female participants studying in Simin Language Institute in Rasht, Iran were selected from among 60 students based on the results of a sample of Oxford quick Placement (OQP) test, who scored from 40 to 47. They were in two intact classes, assigned to one experimental (n=24) and one control group (n=21). The experimental group underwent the teaching of reading comprehension through lexical inferencing strategy to help learners infer the meaning of unknown words and promote their understanding of the text. However, the control group received the traditional instruction of reading comprehension concentrating on the translation of new words. The results of the pre- and post-tests of reading comprehension revealed the significant outperformance of the treatment group over the control group’s reading comprehension ability. It was concluded that lexical inferencing strategy teaching could develop the learners’ potential to improve their cognitive capacities in inferring the meaning of unknown words, which might be facilitative in their reading comprehension.

The ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context

This study examines young English readers’ ability to infer word meanings in context and to use metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings in relation to their reading performance. The participants were 61 fourth-grade students in the United States, comprising 24 monolingual English-speaking (ME) students and 37 English-as-a-second-language (L2) students; each group was also divided into strong and emergent readers in English. Participants were asked to read aloud paragraphs containing words unfamiliar to them in two different contextual conditions (i.e., explicit and implicit conditions), to guess the unfamiliar word meanings, and to tell a teacher how they arrived at the inferred meanings. Quantitative analyses found significant differences between strong and emergent readers in their oral fluency as well as in their ability to infer word meanings and articulate their use of metacognitive knowledge. Although significant differences were found in the ability to infer word meanings and the use of metacognitive reasoning between ME and L2 students, such differences disappeared after controlling for the size of students’ receptive vocabulary. Qualitative analyses also revealed differences in the kinds of knowledge and strategies that strong and emergent readers relied on when constructing the meaning of unknown words in both explicit and implicit contexts.

Analyzing morphology-related strategies in Spanish L2 lexical inferencing: how do suffixes matter?

AbstractIntraword awareness, i. e., of affixes and stems, helps L2 learners in inferring the meaning of unknown words. Learners draw inferences relying on suffixes, prefixes and stems since each element can independently contribute to comprehension. This study analyzes morphology-related strategies in inferencing and focuses on the contribution of suffixes for adult L1 English-speaking learners of Spanish. Differences among suffixes (i. e., transparency, biuniqueness, explicitness of instruction, and cognateness) are taken into account. In a cross-sectional design with learners (n=209) of different proficiency levels (from 2 to 7 semesters of university study), intraword awareness was analyzed by means of two metalinguistic tasks. Participants of all proficiency levels relied on morphology-related strategies, with an increase of proficiency accompanied by an increase in strategy use. As for suffixes, instruction and cognateness mattered more than frequency in guiding students to successful inferencing. Nevertheless, knowledge of suffixes was still limited for the most advanced learners.

Investigation of Vocabulary Learning Strategies to Identify Word Meanings for Saudi EFL Students in Reading Context

This study attempted to answer the following research questions related to the various vocabulary discovery strategies which are used by Saudi undergraduate learners to find unknown word meanings, the most and the least vocabulary discovery strategies the learners used to discover unknown word meanings, the relationship between the type of Vocabulary Learning Strategies used and the scores the learners accomplished on the vocabulary test, and effectiveness of the learner control and the teacher control strategy in enhancing learners’ ability to discover meanings of unknown words. Answering these questions of the study are expected to help language instructors determine the most feasible vocabulary learning strategies to help their students improve their vocabulary and so their language competences. Through purposive sampling, a group of 50 male students participated in this descriptive and analytic type of study. A questionnaire and a vocabulary test were used to collect data. The findings of the study revealed that in understanding a reading text, EFL Saudi students tend to figure out the meanings of unknown words, mainly by guessing word-meanings through different sub-strategies. The least used was the social interaction strategy. It was also found that students’ scores on the vocabulary test significantly correlated (positively and negatively) with the type of strategy they used. This study concluded that it is vital for teachers and textbook writers to design more activities to train students on the use of effective vocabulary learning strategies, mainly guessing through socially linked contextual clues.

The effects of glossing on incidental vocabulary learning during second language reading: based on an eye‐tracking study

Providing glosses that explain the meanings of unknown words is a common method of promoting learners' learning of new words. Numerous studies have shown that compared with no‐gloss condition, glosses benefit the learning of the meaning of new words. This study combines both online (i.e., eye‐tracking) and offline (i.e., immediate vocabulary tests) measures to investigate the influences of glosses on incidental vocabulary learning and evaluating the degree to which glossing influences reading behaviour during second language (L2) reading. The eye movements of 45 high‐intermediate adult learners of English were recorded when they read a text presented on‐screen. Two different text versions (both with 17 new words) were presented to two different groups of participants: first language (L1) textual glossed and no‐glossed. After reading, unannounced vocabulary tests were administered to gauge learners' recall and recognition of vocabulary meaning. Learners performed better in meaning recall and meaning recognition tests under L1‐glossed condition. Eye‐tracking measures of the target words were significantly different in two conditions. Eye‐tracking measures of new words and their glosses in L1‐glossed condition were significantly correlated with learners' scores of vocabulary tests. L1 glosses promote the learning of the meaning of new words in an incidental condition. The attention allocated to the new words is different in L1‐glossed and no‐glossed conditions. More importantly, there is a relationship between the online reading behaviour and the vocabulary test performance in gloss condition.

INFERENCING FAKE WORDS’ MEANING BY MOROCCAN EFL LEARNERS

Do Moroccan EFL learners depend on the context to infer the meaning of unknown words occurring in sentences? This study investigates the way intermediate and advanced learners infer the meaning of fake words. To this end, the subjects took a test consisting of 60 items with three multiple choices. Subjects were asked to provide appropriate, inappropriate meanings of the unknown word or none of the choices without using dictionaries. The Chi-2 tests were adopted to determine whether there is a) a statistically significant difference between the three categories and b) a statistically significant difference between intermediate and advanced learners’ inferencing results. The findings demonstrate that the context along with the lexical knowledge of the L2 learners play the most important role in understanding vocabulary.

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HEAT MAPS AND SCAN PATHS: QUALITATIVE EYE-TRACKING EVIDENCE ON HOW THE QUR’AN IS MEMORIZED THROUGH READING

The process of memorizing the Qur’an typically takes place through reading its printed version (mus’haf). The Qur’an is read word by word so that the process of recalling the memorized verses or chapters is done accurately and fluently. Memorizing the Qur’an may be a great challenge to non-Arabic speakers because of their lack of knowledge in the Arabic vocabulary and grammar; yet more and more non-Arabic speakers continue to memorize the Qur’an for various reasons. In order to scientifically investigate how non-Arabic speakers memorize the Qur’an, a reading experiment was conducted to achieve this aim. Sixty-four (21 Male, 43 Female) native speakers of Malay who have memorized a portion of the Qur’an (10 juzu’ and below) participated in this experiment. Using the Tobii TX300 eye-tracking machine, participants’ eye movements, as they read to memorize four verses of the Qur’an (two with and two without Malay translations), were tracked, and their gaze plots were analysed qualitatively (via heat maps and scan paths). Results show evidence that Malay non-Arabic speakers’ act of reading the Qur’an to memorize it went beyond what is usually known as “cramming”; instead, the process involved finding the meaning of unknown words, so that the process of recalling the memorized verses can be done accurately and fluently.
 
 Keywords: Cognitive processes, eye movements, memorization, psycholinguistics, Qur’an
 
 Cited as: Salehuddin, K., Shahimin, M. M., Sulaiman, M. Z., & Md Zolkapli, R. B. (2019). Heat maps and scan paths: Qualitative eye tracking evidence on how the Qur’an is memorized through reading. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 4(2), 318-334. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol4iss2pp318-334

Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children.

Decades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds and 3-to-4-year-olds exploit function words to determine the syntactic category of novel words and therefore infer their meanings. In a real-time preferential looking task, participants saw two videos side-by-side on a TV-screen: one showing a person performing a novel action, and the other a person passively holding a novel object. At the same time, participants heard only three occurrences of a novel word preceded either by a determiner (e.g., “Regarde! Une dase! – “Look! A dase!”) or a pronoun (e.g., “Regarde! Elle dase!” – “Look! She’s dasing!”). 3-to-4-year-olds exploited function words to categorize novel words and infer their meanings: they looked more to the novel action in the verb condition, while participants in the noun condition looked more to the novel object. 20-month-olds, however, did not show this difference. We discuss possible reasons for why 20-month-olds may have found it difficult to infer novel word meanings in our task. Given that 20-month-olds can use function words to learn word meanings in experiments providing many repetitions, we suspect that more repetitions might be needed to observe positive effects of learning in this age range in our task. Our study establishes nevertheless that before age 4, young children become able to exploit function words to infer the meanings of unknown words as soon as they occur. This ability to interpret speech in real-time and build interpretations about novel word meanings might be extremely useful for young children to map words to their possible referents and to boost their acquisition of word meanings.

Corpora and dictionaries as learning aids: inductive versus deductive approaches to constructing vocabulary knowledge

Corpora are well-known for the affordance to make linguistic regularities salient. Since the coinage of the term ‘data-driven learning’ (DDL) in the 1990s, much has been done to investigate the effects of DDL on learning vocabulary, most notably lexico-grammatical patterns. However, less researched is how learners construct vocabulary knowledge from scratch with DDL approaches. While generalizing recurring lexico-grammatical patterns is relatively straightforward, deducing meanings of unknown words from truncated concordances can be challenging. In this exploratory study, learners constructed knowledge of new words with the inductive approach or deductive one; and their retention of word knowledge was measured holistically using a word knowledge framework. The ways in which learners availed themselves of corpus data in the construction of word knowledge were also examined. The results provide evidence that the inductive approach is more conducive to developing collocational knowledge; and the deductive approach provides the opportunity to consolidate definitional knowledge of the newly acquired words.

NEXUS BETWEEN BELIEFS COLLEGE ENGLISH INSTRUCTORS’ HELD ABOUT TEACHING READING STRATEGIES AND THEIR CLASSROOM PRACTICE

This study examined connections between beliefs college English language instructors’held about reading strategies and their classroom application in teaching reading. Thesites of the target population for this study were students in the Colleges of TeacherEducation in Amhara National Regional State, Ethiopia. In this region, there are tenAdministrative Zones each having one College of Teacher Education. Debre Birhan,Sekotta, Gondar and Debre Markos were selected by simple random sampling techniqueusing lots. From the fourcolleges, twenty-sixinstructors were selected by simple randomsampling technique using lot. Data were collected through close-ended questionnaireitems and structured observation checklist. Data gathered through questionnaire wereanalysed using percentage. One sample t-test was employed to analyse data obtainedfrom classroom observations. The findings indicated that college instructors held strongand positive beliefs about English language reading strategies. However, findingsconfirmed that instructors do not actually apply strategies, such asteaching keyvocabulary in the pre-reading phase, skimming, predicting about the text to read,guessing the meaning of unknown words, scanning the text, how to comprehend textread, summarising the text read and so on in teaching reading. From the findings, itcould be inferred that it would be useful if instructors adjust their beliefs to practices. Tohelp instructors match their beliefs to their practice, there seems a need to train them onreading strategies. Training instructors may acquaint them with the necessary steps andtechniques of teaching reading appropriately.

The contribution of morphological awareness to lexical inferencing in L2 Chinese: Comparing more‐skilled and less‐skilled learners

Learners’ ability to infer unknown words’ meanings (lexical inferencing) plays a key role in word knowledge development for second language (L2) learners. It has recently been acknowledged that learners’ sensitivity to word‐internal structures (morphological awareness) makes an important contribution to L2 lexical inferencing. However, it remains unclear whether the contribution of morphological awareness to lexical inferencing is affected by L2 learner‐related factors (e.g., language skills). Data obtained from five paper‐pencil tasks in Chinese for 73 L2 learners who studied Chinese for two semesters in China showed that (1) for more‐skilled learners, morphological awareness significantly contributed to lexical inferencing with and without contextual cues, whereas no significant relationships existed between morphological awareness and lexical inferencing for less‐skilled learners; and (2) L2 learners’ morphological awareness does not equally facilitate lexical inferencing due to a possible threshold of linguistic knowledge. The findings have implications for learners’ success in inferring the meanings of unknown words

RemedialTutor: A blended learning platform for weak students and study its efficiency in social science learning of middle school students in India

Blended learning is one of the leading trends in education. Blended learning combines computer-assisted learning with traditional classroom learning. The literature shows that the blended learning often helps the students to achieve better learning outcome. However, a majority of the existing learning platforms do not focus on the problems of weak students. Here our objective is to develop a computer-assisted learning platform that focuses on performance improvement of weak students and study the efficacy of the system. This paper presents the proposed system, RemedialTutor, that assists the weak students in effective preparation for an examination. The learning platform performs several tasks on demand; for example, providing the meaning of unknown words, sentence simplification, identification of questionable sentences, extraction of summarized content on a specific topic, preparation of question paper and automatic evaluation, identification of less confident sections, etc. To study the effectiveness of the proposed system, it is tested using a blended learning framework. The system is provided to the students as a supplement to the traditional classroom activities and resources. During the comparative study, the experiment group students used this system during their exam preparation but the control group students relied only on their regular resources. It is found that the experiment group students perform better than the control group. The t-value is 2.3466 and p-value is 0.0243. These values indicate that the difference is statistically significant.