Using External Context Clues to Infer Psychology Vocabulary

Abstract

     The aim of this article is to emphasize the importance of context clue analysis in learning vocabulary. The context clues in this article are external context clues whish consist of two factors: syntactic and semantic. Syntactic clues are related directly to grammatical clues such as the predicative nominative, the coordinating conjunction, the direct explanation, the punctuation, the appositive structure, and the adjective structure. In terms of semantic clues, they are concerned directly with the background knowledge of psychology. The semantic clues include anaphoric relations, restatement, words explained through examples or illustrations, contrast-comparison, figures of speech, cause-effect, condition, synonym, implication, and summary. Using the external context clues helps psychology students as well as other students guess the meanings of difficult words they want to know effectively.