Cultivating Junior Middle School Students' Ability To Guess The Meanings Of Words According To Context

The development of society and the renovation of educational ideas have been raising higher requests for English teaching in junior middle schools. While teaching knowledge in the class, more and more teachers pay attention to the cultivation of students'studying ability and strategies. The ability of guessing the meanings of words according to the context is a comprehensive skill. It has been recognized by many that the ability to guessing the meaning of words is closely related to not only vocabulary learning, but also reading.Discussing the necessity and the importance of cultivating students'ability to guessing the meanings of unknown words according to the context in English learning, the thesis focuses on elaborating the correlation of this ability to vocabulary learning and reading. The thesis also provides many useful strategies of guessing the meanings of unknown words and summarizes the strategies which can be applied to the English teaching in the junior middle school with the examples from the textbook---Oxford Shanghai Edition.The research endeavors to exemplify how training students in the strategies for guessing the meanings of words and cultivating students'ability in this aspect can improve their English proficiency, especially their performance in reading. The empirical study finds that by teaching the students the whole process of guessing the meanings of words by using Clark and Nathan's "Five Steps", students learn how to look for clues and solve problems step by step in reading. It is concluded that the training of the strategies for guessing the meanings of words plays a positive role in stimulating students'learning interest and promoting their reading ability and examination skills.