WORD, LEARNER AND CONTEXTUAL FACTORS IN GUESSING WORD MEANING FROM CONTEXT IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

Tez Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Bursa Uludağ Üniversitesi, SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ, İngiliz Dili Eğitimi, Türkiye

Tez Danışmanı: Yard. Doç. Dr. Meral Öztürk

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2003

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Özet:

The purpose of this MA thesis was to investigate to what extent word factors including word class and morphological complexity, learner factors including proficiency and vocabulary size and contextual factors affect guessing unknown word meaning from context in a second language.

The study was carried out at The School of Foreign Languages of Uludağ University, Turkey. The subjects were the students attending prep classes. The subjects’ proficiency was measured with a C-test and in order to measure their vocabulary size a Vocabulary Checklist was used. In addition to these tests, a Vocabulary Guessing Test was administered to the subjects so as to gather data about the relation between guessing and the factors affecting the guessing process. The target words in the Vocabulary Guessing Test were simple and complex in terms of morphological complexity and they were grouped as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

The results of the study showed that unknown words presented in a rich context were guessed more successfully than unknown words presented in a poor context. In terms of word factors, it was found that morphologically complex words were guessed more correctly than morphologically simple words. When it comes to the relation between guessing and word class, there was no significant difference between nouns, verbs and adjectives, but adverbs, as expected, were the most difficult category to guess. As for learner factors, a significant effect of proficiency and vocabulary size on guessing was not found in the present study.