Guessing from Context
Dubin ( 1993) guessing from context as a way of dealing with unfamiliar vocabulary in unedited selections has been suggested widely by L1 and L2 reading specialists.
Nation and Coady (1988) claim that there are two types of contexts.
The first type is the context within the text, which includes morphological, semantic and syntactic information in a specific text.
The second one is the general context, or non-textual context, which is the background knowledge the reader has about the subjects being read.
Williams (1985) agrees with Nation and Coady in considering the specific context as ‘‘the other words and sentences that surround that word. It follows that other words in the context of the unfamiliar word often ‘throw light on’ its meaning. These other words can be found in the sentence containing the unknown word or other sentences beyond the sentence of the unknown item.
McCarthy (1988) sees context as within the text itself i.e. the morphological, syntactic, and discourse information, which can be classified and described in terms of general features.