The Use of Dictionary and Contextual Guessing Strategies for Vocabulary Learning by Advanced English-Language Learners

Huang, Shufen; Eslami, Zohreh R.

doi:10.5539/ells.v3n3p1

Cited by 22 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…These are not direct, concrete sensory categories, but they still have examples in our direct sensorimotor experience: “That's you” and “that's another” (i.e., someone else). “That's good fortune” and “that's misfortune.” But it is more likely that higher‐order, more abstract categories like these would be grounded in verbal definitions composed of words that each name already grounded categories, rather than being grounded in direct sensorimotor experience (Aitchison, ; Huang & Eslami, ; Nesi, ; Summers, ).…”

Section: Direct Sensorimotor Groundingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Latent Structure of Dictionaries

Vincent-Lamarre

Massé

Lopes³

et al. 2016

Topics in Cognitive Science

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How many words—and which ones—are sufficient to define all other words? When dictionaries are analyzed as directed graphs with links from defining words to defined words, they reveal a latent structure. Recursively removing all words that are reachable by definition but that do not define any further words reduces the dictionary to a Kernel of about 10% of its size. This is still not the smallest number of words that can define all the rest. About 75% of the Kernel turns out to be its Core, a “Strongly Connected Subset” of words with a definitional path to and from any pair of its words and no word's definition depending on a word outside the set. But the Core cannot define all the rest of the dictionary. The 25% of the Kernel surrounding the Core consists of small strongly connected subsets of words: the Satellites. The size of the smallest set of words that can define all the rest—the graph's “minimum feedback vertex set” or MinSet—is about 1% of the dictionary, about 15% of the Kernel, and part‐Core/part‐Satellite. But every dictionary has a huge number of MinSets. The Core words are learned earlier, more frequent, and less concrete than the Satellites, which are in turn learned earlier, more frequent, but more concrete than the rest of the Dictionary. In principle, only one MinSet's words would need to be grounded through the sensorimotor capacity to recognize and categorize their referents. In a dual‐code sensorimotor/symbolic model of the mental lexicon, the symbolic code could do all the rest through recombinatory definition.

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Section: Direct Sensorimotor Groundingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Latent Structure of Dictionaries

Vincent-Lamarre

Massé

Lopes³

et al. 2016

Topics in Cognitive Science

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“…Guessing may additionally depend on the learner's ability to make inferences or analyze words from his general language knowledge -by thinking about synonyms, antonyms, or provided examples -or parts of the words through the word's root or affixes (Fuentes, 1976;Lawson & Hogben, 1996;Nation, 1990;Oxford & Scarcella, 1994). Guessing alone is, however, sometimes considered to be unreliable (Huang & Eslami, 2013;Kaivanpanah & Alavi, 2008;Nation, 1990). Nevertheless, learners might prefer guessing than using other strategies as they may argue that creating a pause to check a word meaning from a dictionary for instance would waste time and lower the motivation to read by blocking the reading flow.…”

Section: Studies On Contextual Guessingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Likewise, Ghazal (2007) mentioned that one way to lessen the burden of foreign language learners' challenges is to assist them by teaching them how to apply vocabulary learning strategies. Contextual guessing and dictionary use for example are two of the strategies that have been emphasized by a number of researchers (Bensoussan, Sim, & Weiss, 1984;Huang & Eslami, 2013;Ibrahim, 2012;Lawson & Hogben, 1996;Mokhtar, Rawian, & Fauzee, 2013;Prichard, 2008;Sultana, 2014) in order to examine the vocabulary learning strategies of English as second or foreign language learners. The present paper emphasized the frequencies of encouragement by teachers and the frequencies of use by learners of contextual guessing, dictionary, pronunciation, and flashcards as vocabulary learning strategies for high school English language learners.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Most and Least Frequent Vocabulary Learning Strategies of High School English Language Learners

Kaya¹,

Charkova²

2014

IJELE

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This study emphasized the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English language teachers encourage students to use, and the strategies that students actually use to build their vocabulary. Finding out whether the students' most used strategies were teacher-encouraged or independently-learned was another point of interest. The participants included 20 male and 23 female learners of English of ages 18 to 22, all of them students in the Arts program at a Southern Congolese high school. They completed a Likert-scale questionnaire of 34 statements and four short-answer questions. Statistical and content analysis methods were employed. The study revealed contextual guessing and dictionary use to be the most frequently encouraged and used strategies, whereas pronunciation and flashcards were the least frequently encouraged and used. These strategies showed no significant difference between the teacher-encouraged and the student-used strategies, which provided evidence about the important role that language teachers play in students' learning in general, and in strategy in particular. Furthermore, the majority of participants attributed their frequently-used strategies to their teachers' practices and advice. Further discussion stresses the potential reasons why pronunciation receives less attention.

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“…According to Nation (2001), learning vocabulary through guessing from context is the most important of all sources of vocabulary learning. Many educators encourage the contextual guessing strategy, which refers to the use of background knowledge and linguistics cues to infer the meaning of unknown words (Kaivanpanah and Alavi, 2008: as cited in Huang and Eslami, 2013). If learners do not know a word, they discover its meaning by guessing from structural knowledge of the language, guessing from an L1 cognate, guessing from context, using reference materials, or asking someone (Schmitt, 1997).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turkish as a foreign language learners awareness and use of morphology in guessing the meanings of unknown words from context: A case study

Yılmaz¹

2015

Educ. Res. Rev.

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This study investigated Turkish as foreign language learners' awareness and use of Turkish derivational affixes as a knowledge source in guessing the meanings of unknown words in written contexts. In addition, this study also examined the type of knowledge sources used in guessing the meaning of the unknown words. The study was conducted with the participation of 10 B1(Threshold, Pre-intermediate) which is based on Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for languages, level students at the Turkish Language Teaching and Application Center (TÖMER) at Gaziosmanpasa University, Turkey. The data were gathered through think aloud procedures. The participants were asked to read a passage and try to infer the meanings of 10 target words that included derivational affixes. The participants were tape-recorded during the think aloud procedures. The tape recordings were transcribed in order to analyze the data gathered from the participants. The data analysis involved reading and rereading of the tape scripts. Then, knowledge sources were identified and classified, and the participants' successful and unsuccessful uses of Turkish morphology were examined. According to the result of the study, Turkish affixes are not effective knowledge sources in determining the meanings of unknown words. Among the knowledge sources used by the participants, Discourse/Text knowledge had the highest percentage (52.0%) and grammatical knowledge had the lowest (0.0%). The result of this study suggests that Turkish suffixes especially derivational affixes had a minimum affect in inferring the meanings of unknown words in context.

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The Use of Dictionary and Contextual Guessing Strategies for Vocabulary Learning by Advanced English-Language Learners

Cited by 22 publications

References 19 publications

The Latent Structure of Dictionaries

The Latent Structure of Dictionaries

The Most and Least Frequent Vocabulary Learning Strategies of High School English Language Learners

Turkish as a foreign language learners awareness and use of morphology in guessing the meanings of unknown words from context: A case study

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