Morphological and contextual clues in guessing word meaning from context in a foreign language

Abstract

Guessing word meaning from context is one of the strategies that language learners frequently use while dealing with unknown words (Fraser, 1999; Paribakht and Wesche, 1999). Language learners tend to use different types of clues including morphological and contextual clues in their attempts to derive word meaning from context (de Bot, Paribakht & Wesche, 1997; Paribakht and Wesche, 1999; Soria, 2001; Nassaji, 2003). The purpose of this study is to investigate whether Turkish EFL learners use morphological clues in their lexical inferencing process and whether they are able to integrate morphological clues with contextual clues while guessing the meaning of an unknown word when they are both present. A vocabulary guessing test was administered to the subjects who were the students attending prep classes at a School of Foreign Languages in Turkey. The results showed that the subjects were more successful in determining the meanings of morphologically complex words. As for the integration of morphological analysis and usage of contextual clues, morphologically complex words were guessed more correctly than simple words in poor context. However, there was not a significant difference between the correct guessing rates of simple and complex words in rich context. The results may be interpreted as support for teaching language learners to infer word meaning through instruction in the principles of morphological and contextual analysis.