- [Instructor] Hello readers.
You know that feeling when you're reading
and you see a word
you've never seen before
and you don't really know how
to figure out what it means?
Well, that's what we're
talking about today:
strategies for figuring out
new words through context.
You're always going to be
encountering new words.
At the time of this recording, I'm 31
and I run into new and
confusing words every day.
I read a lot and it's
always a fun challenge
to run into words like, I don't know,
glabrous or limned or nacreous.
I know a lot about language
and even I have trouble figuring out
what those words mean on their own.
So it's important to rely on context,
the language that surrounds the word.
Let's say you're reading a text
and you come across a sentence
that has a word in it you don't recognize.
Here's a bit from a passage
about the famous chimpanzee
researcher Jane Goodall.
"Jane Goodall arrived at Tanzania's
"Gombee Stream National Park in 1960.
"She was considered
somewhat unconventional
"among other animal researchers.
"After all, she had not
yet been to college."
So let's pause on unconventional.
What does that word mean?
Well, let me give you some ideas,
that's the memory aid I
use to keep it straight.
IDEAS, it stands for
inference, definition,
example, antonym,
synonym, I-D-E-A-S, IDEAS,
which are all different
kinds of context clues.
Every word will have a different context,
so you might need to vary your approach.
The way this snippet is written
let's try inference first,
then I'll rewrite the sentence a few times
to show you the other methods.
Okay, the I in IDEAS, inference.
We can draw conclusions from the context.
If we don't know what
unconventional means,
we can take a look at
the rest of the sentence
or other nearby sentences
to figure it out.
Being unconventional seems to make Goodall
different from other researchers.
She hadn't yet been to college
which implies that the rest of them had.
That doesn't give us a full answer
but it does tell us that
she's different somehow.
So I think unconventional might mean
different than what is normal.
And because I'm making an inference
about this word's meaning I
wanna keep an eye out for it
in other places to see if I can confirm
or revise that working definition later.
D - definition.
Context clues like
these will just give you
the definition of the word in question.
So a good example of that would be:
"She was considered
somewhat unconventional
"among other animal researchers.
"She hadn't been to college yet,
"and this made her
different and unexpected."
Different and unexpected
is a great definition
for the word unconventional.
This style of context clue occurs
when the author expects
a word to be unfamiliar
to you and builds in a guide for you
right there in the text.
The E in IDEAS stands for example,
and this is somewhere between
inference and definition.
If the author describes
Goodall as unconventional,
they'll go on to talk about
something unconventional
that Goodall did.
"She was considered
somewhat unconventional
"among animal researchers.
"For one thing, she hadn't
been to college yet."
So this is very similar
to that initial sentence,
except for the transition
phrase for one thing,
which is a way to set up examples.
Antonym - an antonym is
a word whose meaning is
the opposite of another
word, like how night is
the opposite of day, or how
love is the opposite of hate.
So if there's an example in the text
of what Jane Goodall was not,
we can use that to
figure out what she was.
So let's say the passage said:
"Goodall was unconventional.
"She didn't conform, and
she wasn't ordinary."
There we have two antonyms and our answer.
Similarly, synonym just
means write another word
with the same meaning
similar to a definition.
"Jane Goodall was unconventional.
"She was a nonconformist.
"She went against the grain."
You can see that I had to
rewrite the sentences each time
to apply to each context clue strategy,
which shows me that you won't find
all five context clues every time you need
to search for a word's meaning.
You need to find the approach
that makes the most sense in context.
See what I did there, ah huh?
And failing that, you can always look up
an unfamiliar word in a dictionary.
I love to do that.
I think that's great, but I
also feel a sense of victory
when I correctly figure
out what a new word means,
when I've put it together from context.
And maybe if I'm still
curious, I look it up later
and then I turn out to be right,
and I'm all like "Victory
at sea, I did it!"
Oh, and if you were curious,
glabrous means smooth and hairless
like a leaf or the skin of a frog.
Nacreous means shiny and rainbow colored
like the inside of an oyster shell.
And to limn something means
to draw the outline of
or to be highlighted in light.
You can learn anything, David out.
