ELT365 · Day 178 — Learner strategies for unknown words

Idea — Learners who encounter an unknown word have four options: guess from context, infer from word form, ignore it, or look it up. Teaching the first three explicitly reduces dependency on dictionaries mid-task.

Example — ‘The company was insolvent.’ A learner who notices the prefix ‘in-‘ and suffix ‘-ent’ and knows ‘solve’ can construct a working meaning without a dictionary.

Try — Teach one word-attack strategy this week: prefix/suffix analysis. Give five unknown words with shared affixes. Ask learners to guess meanings before checking.

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