Guessing Vocabulary as a Strategy to Improve Students' Reading Skill

It is commonly said that secondary school students do not use strategies for dealing with vocabulary, especially for unknown words. However, such statement is not true at all. For instance, students asking for the meaning of an unknown word, either to the English teacher or to a partner, reveal that, consciously or unconsciously, they are applying a vocabulary learning strategy. Especial attention should be devoted to vocabulary guessing strategies. This is because those strategies may allow students to have an idea about the meaning of the unknown word easier than looking up the Spanish equivalent in a bilingual dictionary. Therefore, vocabulary guessing strategies might let students not to interrupt their reading so as not to lose the information they are getting from the text.The present research is a qualitative case study.The main reason for developing a case study is because my main concern on the research project is to make a proposal for improving the teaching-learning of English in the public secondary school where I work.Results show that the vocabulary guessing strategies that the participants applied were paraphrasing sections of the text while checking for L1 cognates