Monday, 30 September 2013

Guessing meaning from context


Reading will give a great opportunity to learn new vocabulary and structures as well as it will help you learn better the vocabulary and structures you've worked with in class.
When you are reading and you find a word or phrase you don't know try to guess the meaning from the context (the other words around it). Think also about what part of speech the unknown word is (e. g. a verb, an adjective, etc. ). Think if you've seen it before in another context or if you can remember having seen it in class. Also think whether it is similar to another word in English, or whether it is similar to a word in your language.

If you still can't work out what the word or phrase means, either ignore it and carry on reading or use a good dictionary to help you.

This last option is what you tend to do, you always look up new words in the dictionary and many times you overuse it. Next time you are going to open your dictionary try to guess the meaning of the unknown word from its context. This is what you already do in your own language without noticing, let's try to do the same in English!


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