1. Vocabulary teaching 5 ‘Inferencing’

2. Laufer, B. (1997). The lexical plight in second language reading: Words you don't know, words you think you know, and words you can't guess. In Coady, J. & T. Huckin (Eds.), Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition (pp.20-34). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Words you don’t know Automatic recognition frees up resources Understanding the structure of a text is useless without knowledge of vocabulary. Experiments showed that turning point round about 3,000 word families. This provides something between 90 and 95% of a text. (But more recent assessments say you need more).

3. Words you think you know Deceptive transparency e.g. infallible meaning can’t fall, or shortcomings meaning brief visits? Misunderstood morphological structure: outline = out of the line, nevertheless = never less, discourse = without direction. Literal interpretation of figurative language e.g. sit on the fence – interpreted literally. False friends e.g. sympathetic, tramp, novel. Polysemes given wrong meaning, e.g. since, state, abstract. Synforms confused: cute/acute, economic/economical, industrious/industrial, reduce/deduce/induce When a learner doesn’t know a word they can a) ignore it, b) look it up, c) ask someone d) try to guess it. But can only do the last three if they know they don’t know it.

4. Words you can’t guess Non-existent contextual clues Bensoussan and Laufer found that in standard passage only 13 out of 70 new words could be guessed. Unusable contextual clues Because the words are themselves unknown, or misinterpreted. ‘This nurturing behaviour, this fending for females instead of leaving them to fend for themselves, may take many different forms.’ Clues misleading or ambiguous ‘Typhoon Vera killed or injured 28 people and crippled the seaport city …’ Background prejudice, e.g. interpretation of Margaret Mead‘s recommendation that boys and girls should get different education... A learner who has been taught guessing strategies will not necessarily produce correct guesses.

5. Conclusions and reflections Inferring from context is not a reliable way to get at meaning. But may sometimes be the only way (if teacher absent) Don’t waste too much time expecting your students to guess meanings If they DO guess right, does this help them remember later than if they are told?