The Effect of Guessing Practice on Learner Autonomy of High-school Level Students

Abstract

It is said that the most important part of learning a foreign language is learning vocabulary. The top-down, naturalistic and communicative approaches, which have put great emphasis on implicit, incidental learning of vocabulary, teach us the importance of directing students to recognize clues in context and to infer word meaning from context. Guessing is the primary vocabulary skill in these approaches. It seems to have much to do with students' motivation to learn English as well. It is natural that students learning English should encounter unknown words at a great rate. What should they do if they encounter unknown words while reading books in English ? They may very well try to guess the meanings of unknown words. It is our inclination to try to probe the unknown and guessing is a natural process of our thinking, which gives us a sense of achievement and satisfaction if it is successful. In this paper, the author points out that "learner autonomy" for learning English might be fostered in students' minds through guessing. He believes that students will come to challenge new reading materials on their own some day when they are given enough training for guessing as one of learning strategies, while enjoying it as a soft of game activity in class.