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[Meaning in Context] [Word Form] [College Life] [Movies]

 
Advantage of reading through context:
            You are encouraged to read through context because it trains you to read in large quantity with good understanding. By the time you have accumulated quantity of information and knowledge, you will use dictionary less and less. Accordingly, the first benefit for you to judge meaning directly from context rather than from dictionary is to speed up your reading since you won’t frequently stop to consult dictionary.  In addition, chance to misunderstand the author is small since you are able to judge the relationships of words and sentences - able to link relevant ideas together.  As a result, it also raises quality of your reading comprehension. Finally, the four such strategies will facilitate your comprehension of difficult readings, to enable you to use words ‘precisely’ to fit the various situations you are in, and to increase the quantity of your vocabulary so that you will have adequate words to express different ideas with in-depth meaning.
 
5 strategies to determine meanings of new words: 
            Now, I’d like to explain to you how to understand the meaning of new words, terms, or concepts from context. When you encounter an unfamiliar word, you can often determine its meaning by resorting to helpful clues and cues.  The words “before” or “after” a new word will often give you clues to its meaning. So context (文意) contains those clues or cues (線索; 提示) in the content (內容) you’re reading. In other words, context is made up of relevant words and sentences which connect separate parts into a united whole. Therefore, the cues or clues state relationships of words and sentences. For example, you read a sentence like this: “Pot promotes further drug use problems.” To your knowledge, the basic meaning of ‘pot’ is ‘鍋子’ or ‘一壺茶’ such as a pot of tea. But the sentence is not talking about cooking or making tea. But if you read carefully, you find another important idea in this sentence, which is ‘drug use problem’. So could ‘pot’ have something to do with ‘drug’? To validating your guessing, you must continue to read the rest paragraphs and trace relevant cues or clues to support your understanding. Then you read more messages about this ‘pot’ which could be related to ‘drug’. Then you read marijuana and find it appears many times in the article you are reading. And this article explains people’s views to be against using the drug for medication purpose to treat diseases. As a matter of fact, this drug is used by the majority users for recreational purpose and eventually leads to drug addiction to harm health. The message states such theme as so and so. Therefore, it is easy for you to understand that ‘pot’ in this context is a kind of drug – marijuana, not a container to hold food or beverage. But you will wonder also why ‘pot’ is related to drug? A person smart like you must know by now that ‘pot’ in this context is a container used to burn marijuana before users can smoke it. Pot in this situation is just like a pipe for smoking tobaccos.
 
            In this way, this strategy promotes understanding of your reading. Meanwhile, ‘pot’ is increased into your vocabulary bank when using in different context. Moreover, when you are analyzing relationships of words such as locating cues and clues, you are learning how to precisely use a word with good logic. This is a very important skill for reading and writing. The followings are the five strategies to identify cues and clues in context:
 
  Synonyms and Antonyms
  Logical Relationships
  Verbs
  Punctuation
  Using English Dictionary
 
 
 

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