Tips for Teaching Context Clues
As for context clues, in general they are quite limited in their usefulness to students. Even if they understand what's going on in the passage surrounding a new word, it's still a toss-up as to whether or not that will help them guess its meaning. Rather we should teach our students to look at the context of the whole paragraph or whole passage. More often it's more important that they get the general meaning/gist of the passage rather than the specific vocabulary term. Besides, if they understand what is going on in the passage/surrounding paragraph, they can usually infer some things about the meaning of the unfamiliar word …or…. Just skip it and still continue to understand the passage.
However, in many academic textbooks where a new term is introduced, and its meaning is important, some context clues are often provided. These sometimes take the forms of an example, a synonym, or even occasionally, an antonym following the new term, or simply punctuation. [There are practices available with these types of clues.]
I also always remind students that a passage could contain no context clue at all for the word they're unsure of. The author may just assume it's a word that everyone will already know.
So, in the end, it's good to remind students that context clues are only tools just like prefixes and roots. They may help them guess the meaning, but they won't always work.
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