Whether we’re taking an exam, watching the news, or having a conversation, a word (or two!) that we don’t recognize will surely pop up. This is where a very critical skill comes in handy: guessing from context. In fact, guessing is how we learned most words in our native language.

However, guessing isn’t as easy with foreign languages. This is because we tend to get distracted by a word’s spelling instead of using context clues. For example, someone learning English may see the word “stalk” and think it means “talk” just because the two words look alike. 

As you can imagine, poor guessing hampers a student’s ability to understand English. If you don’t know how to guess, you have to understand every single word you encounter. With decent guessing abilities, you’ll make sense of more English books, movies, and music with less vocabulary.

This is not to mention that poor guessing limits students’ potential to learn vocabulary. Just think of all those missed chances to learn a new word in context! 

So next time a student asks us what a word means, let’s help them cultivate their guessing abilities. As the saying goes, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Tips for Guessing

Here are some tips that we can teach our students.

1. Focus On Context

To guess from context, you need to focus on context. This is a lot harder than it sounds, even for experienced users of a language. For example, when I first saw the word limpid, I immediately assumed it was related to a similar-looking word, “limp.” Well, it turns out I was way off: limpid means “clear and transparent”!

For learners, this problem is even worse, because they’ll confuse parts of speech. For example, your student may see a noun like contamination and think it means “contain,” which is a verb. This confusion of parts of speech will make them even less likely to understand the sentence they’re reading.

So we’ll want to encourage students to focus on context and the word’s part of speech first!

2. Look Up the Word After the Guess

When students guess the meaning of a word, they should look it up in a dictionary as soon as possible. This doubles their chance of remembering it.

You can encourage your student to install dictionary apps on their computer to speed up the process. Google’s hover-over dictionary and Readlang are good choices. 

If they use an Apple computer, they can simply highlight the word, right-click it, and use the “look up” function to look up the words in Apple’s built in dictionaries:

3. Allow Students to Think of a Translation

This final tip applies more to us than our students. When learners guess the meaning of a word from context, many instinctively translate it into their native language. While we may be tempted to lecture our students about thinking in English, research shows that translation allows students to better remember the word than an English synonym or paraphrase.

So let’s focus on helping students guess from context and then allow them to use whatever makes it easier for them to understand the word, whether that be a translation, a synonym, a paraphrase, or an image.

Guidelines to Teach Guessing

But how do we teach students to guess? The easiest way to get them to do that is when they ask you the definition of a word, like this:

Notice that the tutor doesn’t make the student keep guessing until they get the right answer. We simply don’t have time for that. The important thing is to encourage the student to use context to adjust their guess. 

Of course, unless we’re actively preparing a student for reading comprehension exams, we don’t want them to guess more than two or three times per lesson. We can conveniently choose to have students guess from context when we need to look up a word ourselves!

Often, the meaning of the word is directly in the sentence. For example, let’s say you’re reading this article on celebrities bribing universities, and your student asks you what the word “bond” means:

Your student asks, “What does bond mean?” You can say, “The meaning of the word is in the sentence. Can you find it?” If your student needs more help, you can say, “It’s an amount of money that…” and hopefully the student can finish the sentence (“that people pay to be released from jail”).

And if your student gets distracted by the word’s spelling or other meanings (e.g. “to tie” or “to  connect”), make sure to direct them back to the context and the part of speech (“Is ‘bond’ an action or a thing in this sentence?”)

Your student may also ask you about a word that you used during a discussion. In this case, instead of directly telling them the word, you can repeat the sentence again and see if they can guess its meaning. 

What if the student doesn’t guess correctly? If they want to move on, it’s best to tell them the answer. But if it seems that they’re willing to keep trying (after all, guessing is fun!), you can nudge them in the right direction by using the word in another sentence.

📌 Takeaways

For your convenience, here are the main points of this article:

1. Focus on context! Not spelling!

2. When a student asks you what a word means, ask them to guess it. Then make sure they focus on context instead of spelling. Often, the answer is right in the sentence.

3. If a student asks you for a word you’ve just said, repeat the whole sentence and encourage them to guess its meaning.

Happy tutoring!