awej 5 no.4 full issue 2014

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.4, 2014Guessing from Context: A Saudi EFL ViewAl-Homoudthat BELMEKKI those participants & IBRAHIMI did not implement the skill of guessing properly, in case they had done it.The comprehension test in Al-Nujaidi's study concentrated on four main reading strategies asfollows: Drid a) scanning, b) skimming, c) guessing from context, and d) inferencing. The resultsshowed that the means of the first two skills were on top (1.90 and 1.74, respectively). Theremaining two strategies got the lowest means of (1.26 and 1.25, respectively). Contradictorily,Al-Nujaidi‟s participants reported high means of using some subskills of guessing from context.For example, using text features (e.g. tables) (non-textual clues) got the highest mean of allreported strategies (4.95) with a standard deviation of (1.22). Moreover, guessing meaning ofunknown words and using context clues got (4.40 and 4.04, respectively). This shows us thatSaudi students might be familiar with such concepts and strategies but did not receive enoughtraining on how to effectively use them.Another study that deals with the Saudi context is Mushait (2003). About 222 Saudistudents from different university levels (i.e. 1 st year, 2 nd year, 3 rd year, and 4 th year) participatedin this study. Mushait divided his subjects into three language-proficiency groups (low, middle,and high). In other words, the study did not depend on students‟ university level; rather, itdepended on their performance on the study‟s tests (consisting of L2 reading test, L2 vocabularytest, L2 grammar test, and L1 reading test).What relates to the current commentary is the students‟ scores on the Vocabulary LevelsTest (Nation, 1983; 1990). On the 2000 word level (according to Nation‟s (1990) VocabularyLevels Test), the low proficiency group students knew about 1081 words, the middle proficiencygroup students knew about 1541 words, and the high proficiency group knew about 1826 words.On the 3000 word level, the low proficiency group students approximately knew 320 words, themiddle proficiency group students roughly knew 602 words, and the middle proficiency groupstudents knew about 826 words. On the University Words List section, the low proficiency groupknew about 163 words, the middle proficiency group students knew about 266 words and thehigh proficiency group students knew about 424 words. When we calculate all of these figures,we can get the total number of words known by each group, as shown in Table 1.Table 1. Proficiency groups used in Mushait’s (2003) studyType of Proficiency GroupTotal number of known wordsLow Proficiency GroupMiddle Proficiency GroupHigh Proficiency Group1564 words2409 words3076 wordsAs can be noted from Table 1, the low proficiency group scored below the proposed3000-word threshold (Laufer, 1997a, b). They could not even reach the other proposed thresholdof 2000 words (Nation, 2001; Hirsh and Nation, 1993). As a result one can predict that theseparticipants cannot make an adequate guessing due to their low proficiency level. Mushait gavean example to this through his subject Musfer who could rarely guess, and if he did, he guessedwrongly. Musfer scored below the passing score (60%) of his university reading course. He wasable to score 17% only. Regarding his L2 vocabulary and grammar, he got 11 out of 90 and 28out of 90, respectively. Because of such a low level of proficiency, Musfer could not, Mushaitbelieves, transfer some of his L1 good reading strategies (including guessing). Musfer‟s L1Arab World English JournalISSN: 2229-9327www.awej.org513