Confronted with texts, language learners may be stuck by shortage of vocabulary inventory and thus be unable to understand what texts are about. The first thing that a learner does to understand a difficult word is to look it up using the nearest dictionary. There are however techniques learners may use to get the meaning of such vocabulary items. One of these techniques is guessing meaning from context. No matter what level our students are in, they will often come across difficult words in texts they are exposed to.
Guessing meanings of unfamiliar words is a strategy which is worth developing. Guessing the meaning of unknown words from the context is really a very useful reading strategy. This strategy is also called: