ENGL1001 Reading Context Clues

Apply context clues and your knowledge of word familes when you read a text with unfamiliar words.

Discuss and evaluate different vocabulary building techniques to improve your fluency in reading.

Context Clues

• An important strategy to help build your vocabulary is use of context.

• This means using the clues or hints provided in the text that surround an unfamiliar word to help guess its meaning.

• This can include the following: words, phrases, or sentences that appear before, after, or close to the word; visuals or headings embedded in the text

Inference
Definition
Example
Antonyms
Synonyms

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Types of Context clues:

Word Families and word parts (affixes)

• A word family is a group of words that are from the same root word

• This means they share a common origin and often have similar meanings.

• Learning word families helps you to expand your vocabulary, as well as improve your understanding of English words and their relationships.

Word Families

These are letters that come before the word (prefix) or after the word (suffix).

A prefix usually changes the meaning of a word, while a suffix changes the form of the word but not its 'core' meaning.
How can you change the meaning of happy without deleting any letters?

Word Parts (affixes)