How contextual clues and nonsense words facilitate reading comprehension

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the effect of contextual clues and nonsense words on EFL reading comprehension and vocabulary decoding. To this end, twenty foundation year engineering students were assigned to two ten-student groups: The control group was pre taught certain vocabulary items; whereas the same vocabulary items were replaced by nonsense words and the students in the experimental group were asked to discover the meaning through contextual clues. The “t” test analysis of the mean scores on the reading comprehension test showed statistically significant results in favor of the experimental group and students showed gradual improvement in using contextual clues and giving clearer meanings to nonsense words.