A reflective teaching practice on how to deal with the unknown words in reading passages and cloze tests to guess their meanings (A case study of English tests analysis in University Entrance Exams in Iran from 2008 to 2015)

In recent years, in reading comprehension and cloze test sections of university entrance exams, some words appeared that are not usually available in high school textbooks. These words are specially unknown to those students who just rely on usual textbooks taught at high schools. Unfamiliarity with this type of words on the one hand and insufficient reading skills accompanied with shortage of time on the other hand make a stressful atmosphere for the students during the exam session so that most of them can not have a good performance. Although teaching some supplementary books can somehow alleviate the problem, it is not the definite solution. A student while reading a text, should have a good command of knowledge of how to deal with unknown words to help him / her guess the intended meaning. In this paper, by analyzing the English University Entrance Exams (from 2008 to 2015), attempts have been made to reflect thirteen strategies through which a student can guess the meaning of (if not all but some of the) unknown words

کلیدواژه ها:

unknown words ، learning strategy ، guessing the meaning