Usefulness of Contextual Cues in Understanding Unfamiliar Words Introduction: Reading as a cognitive process, has gathered a lot of attention from the psychologists in the last few years. As recently as 1960’s, psychologists knew embarrassingly little about reading and no new information was recorded in many years on various aspects of reading. Today reading is one of the most important topics in cognitive psychology. A cue is a clue/trigger/prompt that helps a person to recall a memory. Contextual cues are signs offered by the surrounding framework which allow a reader to understand a term that isn't a sight word. These cues are favorable for readers who don’t use a certain language as their mother tongue but only as a second language. English is used commonly used …show more content…
Objectives: To see if contextual cues have any effect in the understanding of unfamiliar words while reading or listening. Review of Literature: The effects of explicit teaching of context clues at undergraduate level in EFL and ESL context was a study carried out by Alireza Karbalaei, Fatemeh Azimi Amoli, and Mohammad Mehdi Tavakoli in 2012. This study examined the effect of using explicit instruction to teach context clues as a strategy to help students improve their level of reading comprehension. The results of this study suggest that explicit instruction of context clues is effective in improving college students’ abilities to determine the meaning of unknown words while reading. Another study titled, The Effect of Context Clues on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension Hypotheses: Contextual cues have no effect in understanding the meaning of an unfamiliar word while reading or listening. Plan: The experiment is conducted in two series. (a) Series I: Reading a paragraph which has few unfamiliar words. (b) Series II: Listening to a paragraph which has unfamiliar