21. Improving listening proficiency

1. Guessing meaning from context
As we tend to tell students, they do not need to know all the words in a text to reach comprehension. Silberstein (1994) has argued that knowing how to grasp meaning is one of the most important sub-skill effective readers must develop. Besides helping develop fluency, it also provides ‘semantic links that aid readers in remembering vocabulary items’ (Silberstein, 1994:107). Nonetheless, in order for readers to have enough tools to infer meanings of words, they need to be familiar with 95 - 98% of the lexical items in it. Then, they are capable of making inferences through synonyms in apposition, antonyms, descriptions, examples, glossing, affixation and others.
As there is a minimum of how much readers should be familiarised with the lexis in a text, they need enough aids to make inferences. It might be due to a short-circuit problem. According to Nuttall (1982), this kind of issue happens when learners lack linguistic knowledge to reach a goal. In this case, students sometimes do not have enough previous knowledge of vocabulary. Additionally, some ineffective readers are so used to asking for definitions and consulting dictionaries that they have not developed the suitable strategies to guess meaning from context. Some are also afraid to take risks and do not even try to deduce because they prefer to be safe and resort to dictionaries, the Internet, the teacher or a classmate.
Guessing meaning from context is a sub-skill we should present to our students. A possible way to do so could comprise four steps. Firstly, tell students the list of ways to infer the meaning, which Silberstein cited, and I mentioned above. Then, practice ways to do this at a sentence level: bring three examples of each case, such as She was more than tired; she was exhausted, in which it is easy to infer meaning. Having discussed that, give them the text with the words to be inferred and let them try it individually. If they need help, encourage peer teaching. Only if it is essential, help them. They should notice that they can work by themselves at this stage. Finally, have a decompression moment for the learners to evaluate whether the sub-skill might be useful or if they would like to try again and apply it in other texts.