A good way to make sense of an unfamiliar word is to look at the context: the other words in the sentence and other sentences in the paragraph that might.give clues to the meaning of the word, Dougal (2000: 4).
Context clues have a powerful effect on students’ comprehension of words and sentences. Context clues are the syntactic (structural) and semantic (meaning) clues that help a reader to identify an unknown or difficult word. They are the “hints” about the meaning or pronunciation of an unknown word based on the words, phrases, or sentences that surround it. Syntactic clues relate to the sentence structure or grammar of the English language. For example, in the sentence, I can ride a ____, the syntax, or the way the sentence is structured, indicates that the missing word must be a noun. It would not be structurally correct to say, I can ride a jumping. That sentence does not “sound right”.
Semantic clues relate to the accumulated meaning of the sentence. In the previous example, I can ride a ____, the syntax required the word to be a noun. However, it cannot be just any noun. Semantics narrows the possible word choices to those nouns that would fit with the meaning of the sentence. It would not “make sense” to say, I can ride a tangerine. The semantics or meaning of the sentence dictates that the missing word must be something that can be ridden. Context clues are useful in a number of ways.
Although context clues play an important role in effective reading, research also confirms that the use of context clues is limited for purposes of word learning. The use of context alone will rarely lead to the identification of an exact word. It will narrow the possibilities; however, the reader must orchestrate or cross-check, the use of the visual, graphophonic information about the word (phonics/decoding strategy), the structure of the sentence (syntax), and the meaning of the sentence (semantics) to determine the exact word in a text.
Association and oral repetition are powerful memory tools. If we are like most people, we will discover that from now on, we will remember the meaning of travesty used in this example. We applied the memory devices of placing the word in context, making mental associations with our own experience or information we already know, and repeating the word or phrase out loud. According to Hill (2008: 4) state 5 types of context clue :
- Synonym and definition
- Contrast clue
- Example clue
- General sense
- Clue from another sentence