A Study On Students' Word Guessing Ability Based On Context Theories

The famous linguist Wilkins(1972) has confirmed in Linguistics and LanguageTeaching that, "We can not admit the view that grammar is more important than vocabulary. In fact,we can transmit limited information without grammar. However,we can transmit nothing without vocabulary."Context is the environment in which language is used and by which language conveys its real sense. Combined the characteristics of the language teaching,context can be divided into linguistic context and non-linguistic context. Linguistic context refers to the words,clauses, sentences in which a word appears and it may also cover a paragraph, a whole chapter and even the entire book. Non-linguistic context refers to all the factors relevant to the understanding of a word,a sentence or the contents of a book but not expressed in written form. The theory of context can date back to the early of the 20th century, when Malinowski, the first person to bring forward the concept of context. A word used in different contexts may have different meanings. As Lu Shuxiang, a famous linguist(1975:9),said: " Only in a certain context,can words be given life and easy to remember and used appropriately."So the meaning of a word can be derived from the context clues:Synonym or Restatement clues, Antonym clues, Example clues, Cause/Effect clues, Situation or General knowledge clues and Summary.The project was carried out from March 1st, 2008 to May 30th,2008, lasting 12 weeks. The two hypotheses are :1.After training for a period of time,the students can improve their word guessing ability.2.Word guessing has a positive effect on students' reading comprehension. In order to test the two hypotheses in this experiment,two tests of word guessing,two tests of reading comprehension, a questionaire,and an interview were adopted to make a comparison between the performances of the students before training and after training. After the data analysis,they proved the two hypotheses.