Word and Learner Factors in Guessing Unknown Words from Context in
a Second Language
Meral Ozturk
Uludag University, Turkey
Ebru Ertarman Senyigit
Uludag University, Turkey
Abstract
This study investigates five factors that might be effective in guessing word
meanings from context in a second language. Two of these are related to
the word to be guessed: word class and morphological complexity.
Guessing of 40 English words from the four major word classes (nouns,
verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) were tested. Half of these words had a
morphologically complex structure and the other half were simple. The
other variables were related to the guesser: L2 proficiency, L2 vocabulary
size, and cognitive style. The subjects were university-level EFL learners.
The data were gathered by means of a guessing test, a vocabulary
checklist, a cloze test, and the Group-Embedded Figures Test. The results
suggested that both word factors were effective in guessing, but the study
provided no evidence for the effect of learner variables except having a
combined effect in the case of complex words.
Guessing from context while reading is claimed, by some researchers
(Nagy, 1997, p. 64; Nation, 1990, p. 160, Nation, 2001, p.232), to be a useful
strategy for learning word meanings in a second language. One advantage is
that guessing can be used by the learner independently of the classroom, the
teacher and of any other material used for teaching. To learn a new word’s
meaning the learner only needs the context in which the word has appeared.
The practical implication of this is that the learner will be able to learn words
2
which are not covered in the limited classroom time or classroom material and
thus will be able to build a large vocabulary on her own and one consistent
with her needs. Moreover, the context often contains information about other
aspects of words besides their form and meaning such as collocations,
syntactic behaviour, formality, register and even frequency. With repeated
exposure to a word in rich contexts, it should be possible for a learner to pick
these up along with form and meaning.
Studies on the use of vocabulary learning strategies have shown that
guessing is very popular among L2 learners. In Fraser (1999), intermediate
ESL learners preferred the guessing strategy more often than consulting a
dictionary or ignoring the word altogether when they encountered unfamiliar
words in reading. Harley and Hart (2000) investigated, in a questionnaire, the
vocabulary learning strategies of thirty-four learners of French as a second
language in Canada. Guessing from context was reported as being one of the
most frequently used strategies of word learning. In a large-scale survey of the
word learning strategies used by Japanese EFL learners, Schmitt (1997) has
found guessing to be one of the most frequent strategies as well as being
perceived as most helpful.
In spite of this favourable attitude of both researchers and learners towards
guessing, research on the incidental learning of foreign language words
through reading did not strengthen the case for guessing as a useful word
learning strategy.
Incidental vocabulary learning occurs during a language
activity in which the focus is not on learning words such as when reading a
3
book, watching TV, listening to radio, or having a conversation, and it “primarily
occurs through the process of inferring [i.e., guessing] word meaning” (Fraser,
1999, p. 226). These studies are mostly replications (Pitts, White, and
Krashen, 1989; Day, Omura, and Hiramatsu, 1991; Hulstijn, 1992; Dupuy and
Krashen, 1993; Horst, Cobb, and Meara, 1998) of the study by Saragi, Nation,
and Meister (1978), which investigated the incidental learning of foreign words
by adult English native speakers through reading a novel in their native
language. The results of these studies, though, were not as dramatic as those
in Saragi, Nation, and Meister (1978). While 75 % of the items in Saragi,
Nation, and Meister (1978) were learnt as revealed by a multiple-choice test
following the reading treatment, the highest amount of words retained in its
replications, which also used a multiple-choice format to measure vocabulary
gain with the exception of Hulstjin (1992), was 22 % (Horst, Cobb, and Meara,
1998; Dupuy and Krashen, 1993). These results highlight a difference between
L1 and L2 vocabulary learning. While most vocabulary in L1 is learnt
incidentally from context (Nagy, 1997, p.75; Nation, 2001, p.232), interacting
with a context does not seem to facilitate vocabulary learning in a second
language to the same degree.
Of course, learning words through reading is a process involving several
steps, and guessing may not be, by any means, the only step in the process
where learners fail (see Laufer, 2003): a learner might fail to notice an
unknown word (i.e., noticing); she might notice the word but decide not to
make an attempt to guess it (i.e., decision); she might make an unsuccessful
guess due to a lack of sufficient contextual clues or to shortcomings in her own
4
abilities (i.e., guessing); or she might make a successful guess but may not
remember it later (i.e., retention). Even if the learner successfully retains words
from guessing, the gain may not be reflected in her overall vocabulary size if
the words learnt are small in number. The present study will investigate how
successful learners are at guessing word meanings from clues available in
context as well as the word itself.
A number of factors will contribute to successful guessing in context.
Mondria and Wit-de Boer (1991) identify three groups of factors that could
affect successful guessing. These are contextual factors, word factors and
learner factors. Contextual factors are aspects of the context in which the new
word appears, and among these are the “pregnancy” of context (i.e., amount of
contextual clues available) as well as the frequency with which the new word is
used in the context. Word factors are the characteristics of the word to be
guessed such as morphological complexity, morphological transparency, parts
of speech, or degree of abstractness. Finally, learner / reader factors are those
that relate to the learner’s abilities which include L2 vocabulary size, general
L2 proficiency, or ability to guess.
While contextual factors (Mondria and Wit-de Boer, 1991; Horst, Cobb,
and Meara, 1998) and learner factors (Hulstijn, 1993) have received some
attention in L2 vocabulary acquisition research on guessing, word factors have
been largely ignored. The present study will investigate the effect of two word
factors on guessing: word class and morphological complexity. In addition,
three learner variables will be studied: vocabulary size, general L2 proficiency
5
and field independence. This study will be the first to investigate field
independence and L2 proficiency in relation to guessing.
Word Class
The grammatical category of the word to be guessed is a potential
factor that could affect the difficulty with which it is guessed. Nation (1990,
p.162; 2001, p.257) considers the identification of the parts of speech of a new
word in a text as the very first step in successful guessing. Words belonging to
different parts of speech are likely to present learners with different levels of
difficulty because different word types require different types of contextual
clues to be guessed. Research has shown that SL learners are sensitive to
word class differences in their use of context clues. Paribakht and Wesche
(1999) identified various knowledge sources used by ESL learners to deal with
unknown vocabulary in reading. They found that learners appealed to what
they call “sentence-level grammatical knowledge” (i.e., knowledge of the
grammatical position of the word in the sentence and its relation to other words
in the same sentence, which depends heavily on parts of speech knowledge)
more often to guess the meanings of adjectives. Clues provided by word
morphology was used more with verbs, which often carried information about
the tense and aspect of the sentence through the inflectional suffixes attached
to them. Punctuation was more important to the guessing of nouns:
capitalization signalled proper nouns and commas separated nouns in a
series.
6
As there is no research to our knowledge that investigates the effect of
word class on guessing L2 words from context, evidence will be brought
forward from the L2 acquisition studies on word class to predict differences
between grammatical classes in guessing.
Research into the acquisition of word class knowledge in a second
language suggests that learners’ knowledge of word class information about
the words they know is far from complete. In Odlin and Natalicio (1982),
intermediate and advanced ESL students were able to identify the word class
of high frequency words only 75% of the time. Word class knowledge was
lacking in one-fourth of the words which should be well-known to these
learners at their current level of proficiency. Schmitt (1998, 1999) has found
that his advanced level EFL subjects knew two word class forms on average
out of four in a word family. In only a few cases did they know all four word
class forms (noun, verb, adjective, and adverb). In contrast to the findings of
these studies, Bensoussan (1992) reports only five parts of speech errors (1%)
in a pool of 361 mistranslations to Hebrew of English words contained in a
reading passage by advanced EFL learners.
Strategy research also indicates that using word-class information to
identify word meaning is not very popular among L2 learners. Kanatlar (1995)
used think-aloud and retrospective protocols to investigate the strategies used
by beginning and upper-intermediate Turkish EFL learners to identify the
meanings of nonsense words in a reading text. She reports only 18 instances
of the use of part of speech information in guessing words from context out of
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a total of 561 cases. With this rate, part of speech was the fifth most frequent
strategy among the ten strategies identified as being used by these learners.
Schmitt (1997) investigated the use of a rather extensive list of vocabulary
learning strategies (40 in total) in a large-scale survey of Japanese EFL
learners. Results have shown that analysis of the part of speech of the target
word was not a particularly popular discovery strategy. Only 32% of the
learners reported using this strategy to identify the meaning of a new word
although a majority of the learners (75%) thought the strategy to be helpful. As
the learners progressed through the school system, however, the use of the
strategy increased from 20% to 43% and perceptions of helpfulness increased
from 64% to 87%.
Other studies have concentrated on the relative difference in difficulty
between nouns and verbs. Ellis and Beaton (1996) have found that concrete
nouns were easier to learn in word lists than verbs. In an error analysis with
ESL learners, Lennon (1996) has found verbs to be the most frequent source
of error. In Kallkvist (1998), inappropriate use of verbs in a free composition
task in English was twice as high as for nouns. While there is a clear difference
between nouns and verbs in favour of nouns, these two categories are often
believed to be easier than either of the adjective and adverb categories. In a
study cited earlier, Schmitt (1998) has shown that in a word family learners
were more likely to know the nouns and the verbs than the adjectives or the
adverbs. Laufer (1990, 1997b), on the other hand, reviews the limited SL
research on word class and argues that the differences observed among
words of different grammatical categories in these studies might have resulted
8
from phonological or morphological factors and not from their part of speech as
such. She concludes that there is no research evidence for the effect of word
class on the ease or difficulty of learning L2 words.
While the research cited above on word class differences relate to
learning rather than guessing words in an L2, Nation (1990, p. 48) suggests
that these findings “partly agree with experience in guessing from context” and
that “nouns and verbs are easier to guess than adjectives and adverbs”. In the
present study, we seek to substantiate this claim.
Morphological Analysis
Clues to the meaning of an unknown word may also be found in the
word itself. In the case of morphologically complex words (i.e., words
consisting of a base and one or more derivational affixes), the meaning can be
worked out by analysing the meanings of parts that the word consists of. The
meaning of the word homeless, for example, can be worked out by analysing it
into its separate morphemes as home and -less. Given that the meaning of the
base (i.e., home meaning “a place to live”) and that of the suffix (i.e., –less
meaning “without”) are known it should not be so very difficult for a learner who
was unfamiliar with the word before to figure out that it refers to someone with
nowhere to live.
Although this strategy can be very effective in guessing word meaning if
used in combination with contextual guessing, research reports indicate limited
use of this strategy by second language learners. In Harley and Hart (2000),
9
referred to earlier, the strategy of morphological analysis was one of the least
popular of the discovery strategies used to learn new L2 words. In Kanatlar
(1995), word analysis was the sixth most frequent strategy out of ten strategies
used for guessing words from context. In Schmitt (1997), analysis of roots and
affixes was used by only 15% of the learners surveyed even though the
learners found the strategy generally helpful for discovery purposes. The
perceived usefulness of the strategy increased from 52% to 79% as the
learners progressed to higher grades although there was not any significant
increase in the frequency of use.
A number of explanations might be offered for the reluctance of learners
to use this strategy to identify meanings of new words. First, the learners,
especially at an advanced level of proficiency, might have become aware of
the non-compositionality of meanings of many morphologically complex words
through previous unsuccessful analyses of word structure. Many words in
English are “deceptively transparent” (Laufer, 1989; 1997a) and their
meanings are not the sum of the meanings of their parts. Laufer (1997a, p.
146) provides examples of incorrect guesses by EFL learners based on
morphological analysis: the interpretation of dis- in the word discourse as
“incorrect” and of course as “way” led to the incorrect guess “wrong way”; the
analysis of falsities into fall and cities led to the incorrect guess “falling cities”;
and a morphological analysis on outline produced an “out-of- line”
interpretation of the word. Laufer (1997a, p. 153) urges teachers to “warn the
learners not to rely on word morphology too much and not to draw conclusions
about sentence meaning on the basis of individual words, as some of them
10
may be “pseudofamiliar”, that is, they appear to be familiar though they are
not”. In a similar vein, Clark and Nation (1980, pp. 173-174) and Nation (1990,
p. 168) suggest this strategy be used as part of a checking procedure after a
guess has been made on the basis of contextual clues. Laufer (1997a, p. 153)
also cautions that the meaning worked out from morphological analysis should
be checked against the context in which the word is encountered. Therefore, it
is only sensible for learners not to risk the outcome by applying a strategy
which is not guaranteed to be successful.
An alternative explanation might be that learners might have
deficiencies in their knowledge of derivational morphology of the L2, which
prevents them from analysing morphological structure of words. There is some
research evidence for this inadequacy of second language learners regarding
derivational morphology. Schmitt and Meara (1997) investigated the suffix
knowledge of intermediate Japanese learners and found that they were able to
produce only 15% of possible derivative forms of base words. Their recognition
knowledge of targeted derivational suffixes was better, but they failed to
recognise more than 50% of the legal derivations as being allowable in
English.
Morin
(2003)
trained
L2
Spanish
learners
on
derivational
morphological analysis, but found no effect of training on learners’ vocabulary
knowledge of the L2, although the study “indicated a positive trend in the
effectiveness of morphological knowledge as a tool for building vocabulary
knowledge” (p. 215).
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It is also possible to explain the limited use of morphological analysis in
terms of avoidance. Osburne and Mulling (2001) found that knowledge of
morphology was not lacking in the advanced ESL learners who participated in
their study as shown by a forced-choice task where the learners had to decide
between a morphologically correct and a morphologically incorrect non-word.
In about half of the cases, the learners chose the morphologically correct
option. This was offered as an explanation of the results of an earlier study by
the same authors, which had shown that, when other word recognition
strategies were available like using cognates or context, learners avoided
using a morphology strategy. The authors conclude that learners avoid using
morphological cues not because they do not know them but because they find
morphological analysis difficult, as evidenced by such learner comments from
their study as the following: It’s too hard or You have to think a lot. Blum and
Levenston (1979) were first to document this avoidance phenomenon with
morphologically complex words. In a sentence completion task, more than
75% of the learners of Hebrew failed to use the required complex forms of
verbs. They opted for non-complex synonyms or other acceptable answers.
The present study will investigate if learners are able to make use of
their knowledge of derivational affixes in inferring the meaning of unfamiliar
words encountered in a sentence context rich in contextual clues. Paribakht
and Wesche (1999) reported that learners often used multiple knowledge
sources when inferring the meaning of new words when reading in the L2. We
ask here if learners are able to compound contextual clues with morphological
12
clues, or whether the presence of context clues renders appeal to
morphological clues unnecessary.
Learner Characteristics
Vocabulary size has also been claimed to be important for guessing
(Laufer, 1997a; Nation, 1990). Learners with larger vocabularies should be
able to guess better as they will know more of the words in the context of the
unknown word and thus will be able to utilize more of the contextual clues
available than those with smaller vocabularies. Laufer (1997a) suggests that
95% of the words in the context of the unknown word should be known for
successful guessing to occur. Hirsh and Nation (1992) suggest that the learner
should know 98% of the words in a text to be able to guess the meaning of an
unknown word successfully.
The research evidence for the relation between guessing and
vocabulary size is sparse. While Hulstijn (1993) found a significant correlation
between vocabulary scores as measured by the Levels Test (Nation, 1983)
and inferring ability scores, in Horst, Cobb, and Meara (1998) the correlation
between vocabulary size and the number of words learned incidentally from
reading (i.e., by guessing) was weak. The present study will attempt to
substantiate this relation.
General proficiency in the second language can also be important for
successful guessing. More proficient learners will be able to understand the
13
surrounding context better as they will know more words of the text; they will
understand more of the grammatical structures used in the text; they will be
able to better follow the discourse and will be more experienced readers and
word guessers. Therefore, they should be able to use the context better to
make successful guesses at the word meaning. There is, however, a lack of
research into this relation between proficiency and guessing.
Finally, degree of field-independence of the learner is suggested, in the
present study, as a factor that might be effective in guessing. Fieldindependent individuals are better able to identify figures embedded in more
complex figures and are not distracted by the irrelevant details surrounding the
figure in comparison to field-dependent individuals. Field independence is not
restricted to the domain of visual perception, but is believed to be a basic
cognitive style, which also determines how an individual approaches a learning
task. When applied to guessing, one would expect field independent learners
to guess more accurately as they will not be misled by the irrelevant
information contained in the context and will be better able to pinpoint the
appropriate contextual clues.
More specifically, the following research questions will be sought
answers to:
1. Are there any differences in guessing between nouns, verbs, adjectives
and adverbs?
2. Do learners use their knowledge of affixes to guess the meanings of
morphologically complex words that are previously unfamiliar to them?
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3. Do learners with larger vocabularies guess more successfully than
learners with smaller vocabularies?
4. Do more proficient learners guess more successfully than less proficient
learners?
5. Do more field-independent learners guess more successfully than less
field-independent learners?
Method
The participants were 64 EFL learners (18 males and 46 females)
between the ages of 18-21 in four intact groups in a teacher-training college in
Turkey. Two of the groups were chosen from among the first year classes and
two from the fourth-year classes so that a pool of subjects from the two ends of
the EFL proficiency continuum at the institution, which roughly corresponded to
intermediate and advanced levels of English proficiency, could be selected.
Subjects were assigned later to a proficiency group on the basis of scores on a
cloze test (see below). All participants spoke Turkish as their L1.
The participants answered four tests measuring the various variables of
the study: a guessing test, a cloze test, a vocabulary size checklist and the
group-embedded-figures test.
The guessing test (see Appendix A) measured the subjects’ success in
guessing 40 target words in English. The target words were those in Oxford
Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (1989) that were judged to be unknown to the
15
subjects by the two researchers who have taught these learners over two
semesters. Half of the targets were morphologically simple and half were
complex. In each category, there were five words that belonged to each of the
four major word classes (i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) (see
Appendix B for a list of the test words). The selection of the complex words
was guided by the prefixes in these words. All pages with a given prefix were
scanned for appropriate words. The simple words were selected randomly in
accordance with any criteria set for a given word class category.
The simple words in the test had a simple morphological structure and
contained no affixes apart from the adverbs which all inevitably ended in –ly.
All complex words contained prefixes and some had suffixes that indicated
their word class category like –able in adjectives (e.g., irrefutable) or –er in
nouns (e.g., misnomer). The complexity of these words was thought to have
brought about by the prefixes rather than the suffixes as prefixes change the
meaning of the base in more significant ways than suffixes. The prefixes in the
target words were common prefixes in English (i.e., un-, dis-, re-, pre-, im-, in-,
ir-, mis-), which are usually introduced early to language learners through
frequent vocabulary like misunderstand, disadvantage, irregular, etc. The
bases for all the prefixes in complex words were unfamiliar to the learners as
in irrefutable, misconstrue, or dismantle. The reason for this was to force the
learners to use their knowledge of prefixes in arriving at a guess. They would
be expected to do better on the complex words than the simple words if they
used clues to meaning offered by these prefixes compounded with contextual
clues available in both cases.
16
All verbs in the test were transitive (e.g., enhance, exert, etc.).
Transitive verbs were believed to offer a richer (i.e., more pregnant) context in
that additional contextual clues could be provided through the direct object
(e.g., enhance one’s chance of getting a job).
The adjectives in the test were all attributive. While a predicative
adjective in a sentence may be quite apart from the noun it modifies, an
attributive adjective is adjacent to the noun, which may lead to a more direct
and unambiguous interpretation of the clues provided by the noun.
Other factors that might have an effect on the difficulty of a word like
word length, phoneme-grapheme correspondence, frequency, or the size of
the word family a word belongs to have not been controlled for in this study
because these seem to be more important for long-term retention of words
than for guessing their meaning. However, given the lack of research on the
effect of these factors on guessing, they should ideally be controlled for in
future research.
The target words were tested in sentences rich in contextual clues. The
following sentence for the complex verb uncoiled, for instance, contains a
number of clues to the meaning.
The gardener patiently uncoiled all 100 meters of the long pipe to water the plants at
the end of the garden.
17
In this sentence, the phrases the gardener, the long pipe, and to water the
plants lead to the inference that uncoiling is something done to pipes by
gardeners to water plants and also that it will affect a long stretch of the pipe if
the plants are far from the water source and is likely to take a long time and
therefore, it is something that has to be done patiently.
The contextual richness of the sentences was checked for with 19
native speakers of English who were EFL teachers in various schools in the
city. Initially, 64 sentences each with a different target word (i.e., 8 words for
each category) were pilot-tested for the guessability of the target words on the
basis of the contextual clues provided in the sentence. The native speaker
informants were given the sentences with the target words missing and they
were asked to supply the missing word. The sentences for which more than
50% of the informants provided the original word or a synonym (e.g.,
continuously for incessantly) were counted as sufficiently rich in contextual
clues. The top 5 items in each category which matched this criterion (i.e., 40
items altogether) were used in the final version of the test.
For the main data collection, 20 distractor sentences which tested
grammar words from minor word classes (e.g., with, unless, much, although,
etc.) were added and randomised with the target items. Two versions of the
test were developed by swapping the first half of the test with the second. The
target words were written in bold and underlined. The subjects were asked to
give an L1 equivalent for the target words. Two points were granted for an
exact equivalent, 1 point for a synonym of the exact equivalent (e.g.,
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anlaşmazlık meaning ‘disagreement’ for feud) and no points for an unrelated
word (e.g., hastalık meaning ‘sickness’ for feud).
Subjects’ vocabulary sizes were measured by means of a checklist (see
Appendix C) following Meara and Buxton (1987). The words in the checklist
were selected randomly from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
(1995), which contains 56000 headwords. The sixth headword on every twenty
pages of the dictionary was picked up, which yielded 60 words with a pick-up
rate of 1 in 933. Certain types of words were avoided like proper nouns,
abbreviated forms, words that belong to specific registers (i.e., religion,
medicine, etc.), words belonging to other languages, slang words, grammar
words or past and past participle forms of irregular verbs. These real words
were mixed with 20 non-words some of which were chosen from introductory
linguistics coursebooks and others were invented by one of the present
researchers. The words were randomised and two different orders of the test
were developed. The words were presented in eight blocks of ten words in
order to relieve the monotony and inattention that might result from a single
unbroken list. The subjects were asked to check the words they knew.
In the calculation of vocabulary size, the number of words in the
checklist known to a subject was taken to be the number of real words
checked by the learner, which was then adjusted according to the number of
non-words checked. Adjustment was necessary, as some of the real words
might have been checked as known when they were not. The number of nonwords was one third of the number of the real words in the checklist.
Therefore, the number of non-words checked by a learner was multiplied by
19
three and the result was subtracted from the number of real words checked.
For example, a subject who checked 50 words 48 of which were real words
and 2 non-words might have checked, with this rate, 6 of the real words
inaccurately as known. The number of words known to the subject is the
number of real words checked minus the corrected number of non-words
checked (48-6=42). The result was multiplied by 933 (i.e., the pick-up rate) to
estimate the number of words known in the dictionary (42x933=39186 words
out of 56000). These scores were then used to divide the subjects into two
groups as those with a larger vocabulary size and those with a smaller
vocabulary size. Subjects who scored above the mean (i.e., 25 words on the
test corresponding roughly to 23000 words) were considered to have a larger
vocabulary while those who scored below the mean had a smaller vocabulary.
The somewhat high mean vocabulary size might be attributable to the
fact that the scores represent lexical items rather than word families in that
LDOCE chooses to present words belonging to different parts of speech of the
same word family as different headwords with the result that the number of
words in the dictionary as well as the number of words known to the learners
are increased. Large vocabulary sizes are also expected of this group of
students as they are already at a pretty advanced stage of proficiency with
substantial vocabulary in English. The purpose of the test was merely to draw
a rough distinction between those who acquired a larger vocabulary and those
with a relatively smaller vocabulary in the group, and the test seemed
adequate towards that end.
20
Field-independence was measured by the Turkish version of Witkin’s
(1976) The Group Embedded Figures Test (Okman-Fisek and Maktav-Yildirim,
1983). The subjects were given scores relative to the difficulty of items (i.e., 2,
4, and 8 points respectively for each item in the three sections). The highest
score a subject could get was 122, which represented extreme field
independence. The mean score of the group (i.e., 85) was taken as the cut-off
point to assign subjects into one of two groups. Those who scored 85 or more
were classified as more field-independent and those who scored below 85
were categorized as less field-independent.
Proficiency was measured by means of a cloze test (see Appendix D).
The standard cloze is often used as a measure of overall ability in language
testing and suggested, by Hughes (1989, p.62-3), to be an economical way of
obtaining an approximate idea of someone’s ability, which was also our main
motive in using the cloze.
In making the test, the blanks were created using the fixed-ratio deletion
technique. Every seventh word of the text was deleted with the exception of
the first and last sentences, which yielded 50 blanks. Subjects were instructed
to fill in the blanks with one word only and guess if unsure. The answers were
scored using the exact word technique where the only correct answer was the
original word itself. Each blank was worth one point. The maximum score that
could be obtained was 50. The mean score of the group with first and fourth
year students combined was 17 and subjects who scored above this were in
the higher proficiency group and those who scored below were in the lower
21
proficiency group. The fact that the mean score turned out to be somewhat low
for this group of learners is probably the result of the scoring technique used.
With this technique, synonyms of the original word which would be perfectly
acceptable in the given context had to be rejected.
Oller (1979, p. 367)
provides evidence from research that compare the exact word technique and
the synonym technique, and argues that while the synonym technique yields
higher scores than the exact-word technique the distribution of scores remains
the same. Since the purpose of using the cloze-test in the present study was to
divide the subjects into two groups that differed in proficiency relative to one
another rather than to determine their exact level of proficiency, the distribution
of scores was considered more important than the actual values they
represented. The exact-word technique seemed both adequate and practical in
this respect.
The subjects answered the tests in their usual class hours over two
weeks. In the first week, they answered the cloze test and the checklist in one
sitting and on a different day they did the group embedded figures test. In the
following week, they answered the guessing test. All instructions were given in
the L1 both in written and spoken form to avoid any misunderstanding.
Data Analysis
The data were analysed by a 5-way ANOVA on Statistica 4.5 for
Windows (see Appendix E for the ANOVA results). The two within-subjects
variables were morphological complexity and word class. The betweensubjects variables were proficiency, vocabulary size and field independence.
The main effects of both within-subjects variables were statistically significant.
22
There were no significant main effects, however, for the between-subjects
variables. Only two of the interactions were significant: the two-way interaction
between morphological complexity and word class and the four-way interaction
between proficiency, vocabulary size, field independence and morphological
complexity.
Results and Discussion
The participants in the present study guessed about half of the test
words correctly. On the average, they scored 43.4 points over the possible 80
points (54%) in the guessing test (see Table 1 below). Overall, they were not
as successful in guessing as would be expected of them given the richness of
clues in the surrounding context and the tightness of focus on guessing words.
This result could be offered as an explanation for the discouraging findings of
earlier studies on learning words from reading L2 texts (essentially through
word guessing), which reported up to 22 % gains for non-native speakers.
Gains in these studies often represent the retention rate of correctly guessed
words. If learners guess only about half of the words correctly, as this study
indicates, there will not be many words available for correct retention. It would
follow from this that low learning rate from reading is largely the result of
incorrect guesses. However, the discrepancy between the rate of correct
guessing in this study and the highest learning rate in incidental vocabulary
learning research (54% vs. 22% ) suggest that other factors are also at work.
One of these could be that when guessing learners attend to the meaning
whereas learning requires attention to both meaning and form. Because form
23
is arbitrary it is likely to be forgotten very quickly and require repeated
encounters to be acquired in association with the corresponding meaning.
Table 1
The lack of success in almost half of the items also raises concerns as
to the adequacy of single-sentence contexts in providing the contextual
richness necessary for successful guessing. It is all too possible that a single
sentence, however rich in contextual clues, does not match the detail provided
by a whole text.
The present study revealed interesting results with respect to
morphological complexity. On the whole, simple word scores were higher than
complex word scores (see Table 1 for the means and standard deviations of
the main variables of the study). The difference was found to be statistically
significant (F.05(1, 56)=123.31, p<.000). Thus, the learners in the study
guessed the meanings of simple words more correctly than those of complex
words although one would expect them to do better with the complex words if
they used clues provided by the target word.
Two explanations can be offered for this result: it is either that the
learners did not use morphological clues at all and relied on contextual clues
only or that they used morphological clues but not very effectively. The former
explanation is less likely to be true, in which case no significant difference
would have been observed between simple and complex word scores as the
learners would have treated complex words as single units like simple words
and rely solely on context for guessing their meaning.
24
The lower success scores with complex words, on the other hand,
suggests that learners used morphological clues, but were not able to work out
the meaning quite well. The difficulty of the complex words probably resulted
from the unfamiliarity of the bases for the prefixes rather than from avoidance
of using prefix knowledge. It seems that learners were aware of the clues
offered by the prefixes, but they were confused rather than helped by them
when the base was unfamiliar. In a similar study, Manga (2003) compared the
guessing of simple words with that of complex words using single-sentence
contexts. The results revealed significant differences in favour of complex
words. The complex words in her study contained familiar affixes and bases
and thus, the learners were able to perform morphological analysis on these
words. On the other hand, the unknown bases in the present study probably
rendered them semantically opaque for the subjects. For successful guessing
to take place, it is, therefore, important that the word to be guessed should be
subjectively transparent (i.e., that all parts are known to learners) as well as
being descriptively transparent (i.e., the meaning of the word could be inferred
from the meanings of the parts).
Significant differences were also found among word class categories
(F.05(3,168)=10.75, p<.000). Verbs and adjectives were guessed more
successfully than nouns and adverbs. However, the difference between verbs
and adjectives, on the one hand, and nouns and adverbs, on the other, was
not significant at .05 level according to Tukey HSD Test (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
25
Although previous research into the learning of word class categories in
a SL indicated nouns to be the easiest category, nouns in the present study
turned out to be as difficult to guess as adverbs and more so than verbs and
adjectives.
Two explanations might be offered for the lower success rate of the
learners with nouns. First, the nature of the nouns used in the study might be
partly responsible for this result. In our attempt to find test words that would be
unknown to our subjects of advanced EFL proficiency, we opted for lowfrequency words in the case of nouns as high-frequency nouns tend to be
generally known at this proficiency level. As low-frequency nouns are often
abstract in meaning, the noun category consisted mainly of abstract nouns.
Abstract nouns are generally considered to be more difficult to learn
than other types of nouns. Referring to the categorization of nouns proposed
by Lyons (1977), Hatch and Brown (1995, p. 220) attribute the difficulty of
abstract nouns to the fact that they are less typical. Lyons (1977, Vol. 2, pp.
422-466) identifies three categories of nouns. First-order nouns are concrete
objects that exist in time and space, second-order nouns are states, processes
and events and as such they take place in time and finally third-order nouns
denote abstract entities which have no relation to time and space. Hatch and
Brown (1995, p. 220) claim that first-order nouns, being more corelike (i.e.,
typical), should be easier to learn than second-order nouns and second-order
nouns easier than third-order nouns. Being the least corelike of the noun
category, abstract nouns must be the most difficult.
26
Indeed, research shows that learners have more difficulty acquiring
abstract nouns than concrete nouns. In Kallkvist (1998), referred to earlier,
91% of the inappropriate use of nouns involved abstract nouns. If this is the
case, the statement that nouns are the easiest category does not apply to
nouns universally. Nouns might be easier to learn and to guess than other
categories when they are concrete, but may not be so when they are abstract.
However, hard research evidence as to the effect of abstractness in word
learning is lacking. Laufer (1997b), in her review of the factors that affect word
learning, concludes that concreteness does not have a clear effect.
Alternatively, nouns may be easy to teach and learn, but may not be
easy to guess. While the other categories have relational meanings (i.e.,
adjectives are related to nouns, adverbs to verbs, and verbs to nouns in the
sentence), nouns have largely independent meanings. Aitchison (1987, p. 102)
argues that nouns “are relatively free of syntactic restrictions. Verbs, on the
other hand, are intrinsically entangled with the syntax of the sentence”. While
nouns may provide good contextual clues to the meaning of words from other
categories, they may not, in turn, receive the same contextual support. This is
a matter for future research.
The non-significant difference between verbs and adjectives suggested
that adjectives are not more difficult to guess than verbs. The fact that the
adjectives in the study were all attributive suggested close proximity of
contextual clues: the noun modified by the adjective provided immediate clues
27
to the meaning of the adjective. Thus, contextual clues could be interpreted
directly and unambiguously, which might have led to increased accuracy in
guessing. The same explanation might be offered for Paribakht and Wesche’s
(1999) finding regarding greater frequency of use of sentence-level
grammatical knowledge as a knowledge source for guessing adjectives. It is
likely that learners experience little difficulty if at all in relating the adjective to
the noun it modifies when it immediately precedes it, which helps to materialize
the meaning of the adjective. While, for example, the meaning of the word
ardent is more elusive and abstract in isolation, it becomes rather more
specific when used to modify the supporters of a football team as in the
following sentence from the guessing test:
He is one of the most ardent supporters of Galatasaray I’ve ever seen.
The results suggested that adverbs are the most difficult class of words
to guess, which was hardly unexpected. In the data with native English
speakers, the blanks for adverbs often elicited prepositional phrases with quite
different meanings from the target adverbs but which were also appropriate in
the given context. Also, several non-synonymous adverbs were appropriate in
a given context. This versatility might be a factor in causing adverbs to be
difficult to guess.
The interaction between morphological complexity and word class was
revealed to be significant by ANOVA (F.05(3, 168)=5.000, p<.002). An
examination of the means in Figure 2 has shown that the differences among
word class categories were more marked in the case of simple words. Tukey
28
HSD Test on simple word means indicated that simple verbs and adjectives
were more successfully guessed than simple nouns and adverbs whereas
there was no statistically significant difference between verbs and adjectives
and between nouns and adverbs. These differences observed among word
classes in simple words seem to mirror the overall differences among word
class categories, which suggested that overall differences were in fact a
reflection of the differences in simple words only, as the group mean scores in
complex words were stable across word class categories.
Figure 2
In the case of simple words, the only type of clue that was available to
aid guessing was contextual and the fact that different word categories were
guessed with different success rates suggests that the degree of contextual
support for some categories must be different from the others. While verbs and
adjectives seem to be well-supported by the context, nouns and adverbs seem
to be at a disadvantage in that respect.
In complex words, on the other hand, there were no differences among
word categories, which suggests that the contextual clues did not work
differently for different types of words. This might be taken to mean that the
context did not play an important role in the guessing of complex words. Still,
the learners guessed about 9 of the 20 complex words (17.5 points out of 40,
cf. Table 1) successfully. If this cannot be explained by the use of specific
contextual clues in the sentence, it will have to be explained with the use of
29
prefix knowledge. However, prefix knowledge alone may not be considered
sufficient to explain this result given the unfamiliarity of the bases to the
learners. We would suggest here that learners made intelligent guesses with
the complex words by using their prefix knowledge in combination with a global
understanding of the sentence meaning and knowledge of the world
concerning the situations described in the sentences.
None of the main effects involving the subject variables of the study
reached statistical significance: proficiency (F.05(1, 56)=0.25, p<.617),
vocabulary size (F.05(1, 56)=2.54, p<.116) and field independence (F.05(1,
56)=.032, p<.856). Subjects with a higher level of L2 proficiency did not guess
significantly more correctly than those with lower L2 proficiency. Subjects with
larger vocabularies did not guess better than those with smaller vocabularies,
and more field independent learners were not more successful than less field
independent learners.
Although subject variables were not effective individually, together they
had a significant effect on guessing in combination with morphological
complexity (F.05(1, 56)=6.564, p<.013). The combined effect of subject
variables was examined by Tukey-HSD post-hoc comparisons separately for
simple and complex words. There was only one statistically significant
difference, which related to the guessing of complex words (see Table 2).
Higher proficiency subjects with a larger vocabulary size and a more fieldindependent learning style guessed complex words more successfully
(mean=21pts) than those who were highly proficient and more field-
30
independent but had a smaller vocabulary size (mean=13.2pts). This suggests
that a larger vocabulary facilitates the guessing of complex words if the subject
has a more field-independent style and is more proficient in the target
language.
Table 2
One might offer the following explanation for the facilitative effect of
vocabulary size in combination with proficiency and field-independence on the
guessing of complex words. Higher proficiency in the L2 and a more fieldindependent style will lead to a better processing of the surrounding context.
When this is compounded by more experience with complex words that might
be afforded by a larger L2 vocabulary guessing will be facilitated. In other
words, these individuals will be able to use contextual and morphological clues
in combination when guessing complex words and thus, be more successful at
it.
The insignificant effect of the subject variables, on the one hand, and
the significant effect of these in combination on the guessing of complex words
on the other suggest that the subject variables had an effect on guessing; but,
for some reason, these were too weak to reach statistical significance
individually. Only in combination did they make a strong enough effect to be
statistically significant. The fact that only two of the 72 possible differences
among the nine three-way combinations of the subject variables on complex
31
word scores were significantly different further suggests that the effect was
weak.
Manga (2003) explains similar findings by the strict control of vocabulary
and structure in the context of the target word. As in her study, all the words in
the context of a target word were known to the subjects in the present study,
and the structure of the sentence was equally comprehensible. Therefore,
more proficient learners and / or those with greater vocabulary sizes did not
have an advantage over the less proficient learners or those with smaller
vocabularies, as the latter did not experience any more difficulty with the
surrounding context than the former. In further studies, if the context around
the target word is varied between difficult and easy structure and / or
vocabulary, more significant effects of proficiency and vocabulary size
variables could be obtained.
Conclusion
In general, this study suggested that the nature of the word to be
guessed affects the correct guessing of its meaning from context in significant
ways. Different word class categories seem to present learners with different
levels of difficulty. There is some indication, however, that the difficulty of
guessing words in a major word class may not be uniform within the class.
32
Sub-classes of major categories might pose different challenges to the learner.
For instance, concrete nouns may not be as difficult to guess as abstract
nouns, or attributive adjectives as predicative adjectives. It seems necessary,
therefore, to be more precise when using the major word class category labels.
When one says noun, for example, does it refer to all types of nouns or only to
the most typical type, i.e., concrete nouns? Word class labels are often used in
the latter sense, but findings are generalised to the category as a whole, which
may or may not be generalisable.
The morphological make-up of a word also seemed to have an effect on
guessing. Morphologically complex words seem to be difficult to guess when a
part of the word is unknown to the learner. The subjective transparency of the
complex words seems to be as important to correct guessing as the
descriptive transparency.
The three learner factors investigated, namely second language
proficiency, vocabulary size and field-independence, were only effective in
combination and then only in complex words. With larger groups and with
greater differences among the groups with respect to a given construct, more
significant differences might be obtained.
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