On the Contribution of Context to Vocabulary Learning

Educational researches in the field of vocabulary acquisition emphasize different instructional trends to expand language learners’ vocabulary knowledge; in this line, a great number of researches along the two major modes have been conducted: acquisition through direct instruction of vocabulary, and incidental vocabulary acquisition through exposure to context. Although the effectiveness of direct instruction has been supported, the sheer size of the vocabulary learning task makes it apparent that direct instruction alone cannot be responsible for all of the words acquired by native speakers or even by non-native speakers (Walters, 2004); therefore, deriving meaning of the word from the context can be a powerful contributor to vocabulary acquisition. In order to highlight the issue, this book enjoying a comparative nature, not only does touch the possible efficiency of two groups of contextual clues (i.e. synonyms/antonyms, and collocations) in general, but also compares the possible superiority of using a certain contextual clue on the performance of EFL learners’ vocabulary acquisition.