You have probably noticed that every grade level gets a little more challenging. The reading assignments become more technical with increasingly difficult vocabulary. For example, in science or social studies texts, the chances are pretty good that you will read words you have never seen until that instance.

When you encounter an unfamiliar word in a text, you have several ways to find its meaning, but let’s discuss two for now: looking up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary or trying to determine the meaning by examining its context, the words and sentences that surround the unfamiliar word. When you examine the words and sentences that surround an unknown word, you are searching for context clues that will help you determine the unfamiliar word’s meaning. Since looking up every word in the dictionary is not practical, using a combination of reference materials and analyzing context clues is the most effective and efficient way of improving your knowledge of new words.