To get the meaning of the unfamiliar words the students usually turn to the dictionary, which provides one or more definition of the words. The use of dictionary in such a situation seems to give a practical solution, because they are expected to get the meaning of words immediately after reading a list of definitions and picking up one which sounds suitable. However, they should not depend on the dictionary as the main aid to comprehension of a particular reading text since other problems may arise when the dictionary is used as the major means of gaining vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension.

The first problem concerns with the students' motivation. Robinson (1975) believes looking up the meaning of the words in the dictionary frequently may be quite ineffective since it obstructs the flow of comprehension process which is going on in the students' mind. In the long run, they will lose interest in what they are reading, and this can be harmful for their motivation to read further. Another problem relates to the definitions presented in the dictionary. Nagy (1988) finds that many definitions are simply not very good, inaccurate, or not appropriate to the reading selections. Moreover, the definitions deal only with superficial level of word knowledge, and therefore they cannot guarantee thorough comprehension of the reading texts containing the words which are defined. The words in the reading texts are presented in a context, and occasionally the definitions supplied by the dictionary do not match this context. Therefore, context should be taken into account in determining the meaning of words.

This fact requires that the students employ context clues to figure out the meaning of the unfamiliar words in a reading text. What they should do when employing context clues is to make use of surrounding information to identify the unknown meaning of words. It is essential that this vocabulary strategy be applied, in addition to the use of dictionary. Grellet (1990) even suggests that the students be encouraged to make an intelligent guess at the meaning of the words they do not know rather than look them up in the dictionary.

Basically there are two types of context clues, namely, semantic clues and syntactic clues. In figuring out the unknown meaning of a word by means of semantic clues, the students should rely on the meaning of the words surrounding it as clues. If they make use of syntactic clues, they are supposed to apply their knowledge about grammar.

Statement of Problems

Objectives of the Study

Hypothesis

There is significant contribution of the use of syntactic clues to the use of semantic clues.

Significance of the Study

It is also expected that the results of the study can provide an overview of the context clues utilization on the part of the readers. Practically, this overview will be of great value for teacher of reading comprehension because it can serve as one of the basis for selecting the appropriate reading materials: the context clues that the students employ the least should be more emphasized in the materials so that they develop more effective use of context clues in their attempt to comprehend English passages.

The study is also useful for the students of reading comprehension. The results of the study will reveal various sorts of semantic and syntactic clues usually utilized by the students. The students can be made aware of the existence of these clues as one of the vocabulary strategies in reading comprehension. By applying this strategy consciously, hopefully they can improve their comprehension.

Review of Related Literature
Reading Comprehension

Smith as quoted by Otto et al. (1979) classifies the levels of comprehension into four categories: literal comprehension, interpretation, critical reading, and creative reading. The lowest level, i.e. literal comprehension, involves getting the direct meaning that has been explicitly stated, while interpretation requires the reader to identify ideas implicitly stated. In critical reading, the reader evaluates what is read. At the highest level--creative reading--he is expected to apply ideas which have been read to a new situation. Similar to Smith, Barrett (1972) develops taxonomy of comprehension consisting of four levels. Later, Turner (1988) modifies this taxonomy by reducing the levels into three only: literal, inferential, and evaluational comprehension.

The level which is closely related to the study is the inferential one. According to Turner (1988), a reader draws inference when he brings pieces of information together to form a different concept. In performing this inferential comprehension, the reader should make use of context, be aware of language, be able to choose among alternative meanings of words and expressions, and understand the implied relationship in order to discover the author's message and the meaning which he intends to convey.

By doing so, the reader can make an inference, i.e. either filling in the missing information or finding the semantic and/ or logical relationships among elements in the reading material. The reader is involved in an active process of choosing the appropriate meaning from several alternatives and deriving meaning from the explicitly stated information in the text. That is, he examines all the information the author provides in order to infer the right meaning. However, the meaning the reader derives is not necessarily limited to that information; the background knowledge that he possesses also plays a role in inferring the meaning by relating what he already knows and what he does not know. The existence of this background knowledge is explained in a theory called schema theory.

Schema Theory

According to Rumelhart, these schemata can be activated in two ways by using the process called bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up process occurs when a subschema which has been activated causes various schemata to be activated. This process therefore is also called data-driven activation. The conceptually driven or top-down process works in the opposite way: it occurs when the activation of a schema leads to the activation of its subschemata.

Schema theory, when applied in reading comprehension, relates to the background knowledge which assists the reader when they are trying to comprehend reading texts. According to this theory, the reader provides schemata to make sense of the texts, and they do this persistently (Carrell and Eisterhod, 1988). He will fail to comprehend the text if he cannot access the appropriate existing schemata or does not have the appropriate schemata necessary to understand the text. This theory, then, suggests that the reader should possess background knowledge about the content of the text. The knowledge the reader has already had will anchor the new information or ideas stated in the text (Anderson and Pearson, 1988). The less the background knowledge that the reader possesses, the more difficult the comprehension will be.

The background knowledge takes part mainly in the top-down processing, while the bottom-up processing primarily involves grammatical skills and vocabulary development (Carrell, 1988). These two processes do not work separately, however. As Rumelhart (1980) remarks, they occur simultaneously in processing the information that enters the mind.

Carrell (1988) further states that a word actually does not have a fixed meaning but rather has a variety of meaning around a prototypical one, and these meanings are determined by the context in the reading passage and the background knowledge possessed by the reader. The knowledge of vocabulary, therefore, requires the knowledge of the schemata which contains the appropriate concepts of the word.

Vocabulary in Reading Comprehension

The relationship between these two is also apparent when readability is concerned. The study of readability has contributed the view which says that the difficult words in a certain passage can make the passage more difficult to understand. The criteria of the difficulty are usually determined on the basis of word frequency, word familiarity or word length (Nation and Cody, 1988; Hill, 1979). This means that sentences are usually more readable if they contain words that are of high frequency, that are more familiar to the reader, or that are shorter. The fact that word frequency affects comprehension is supported by a study conducted by Kusumarasdyati (1992). The study finds that low-frequency words have significant effects on the readability of reading passages. As for word length, longer words--words containing more syllables--are predicted to be more difficult, although occasionally the length does not guarantee that a certain word is difficult.

To overcome the difficulties in vocabulary, a reader will attempt to apply various vocabulary strategies. They enable the reader to attack the unknown meaning of the words and eventually to help them comprehend the reading passages. Robinson (1977) suggests three vocabulary strategies which should be adopted by the reader to overcome the lexical difficulties. The first one is wide reading, which requires the reader to spend more time to read various materials in a great number. In this way he can increase his vocabulary since encountering the words in the reading over and over again lead to the familiarity of the meaning of those words. Another strategy involves the use of dictionary. However, as stated in the introduction, dictionary should not be used as the major means of gaining vocabulary competence or looking up unknown words or expressions. A reader cannot possibly keep referring to a dictionary every time he is uncertain of word meaning. Besides interfering the sequence of thought in his mind, it discourages the unmotivated students. They need to learn to use dictionaries as reference when they cannot understand the message through context.

It is the context which becomes the third vocabulary strategy. This strategy, which is the central issue in the study, deserves a separate and more elaborated discussion in the following section.

Context Clues

In guessing the meaning of words by using context, the reader has to learn to look for a number of clues in the context (Nattinger, 1988). According to Nattinger, the clues can be provided by the topic (or the title), the other words in the discourse, and the grammatical structure, including the punctuation. The strategy that the reader does in guessing from context according to Nation and Coady (1988) is as follows:

1. Find the part of speech of the unknown word.
2. Look at the immediate context of the unknown word and simplifying this context if necessary.
3. Look at the wider context of the unknown word, i.e. the relationship between the clause containing the unknown word and surrounding clauses and sentences.
4. Guess the meaning of the unknown word.
5. Check whether the guess is correct.

There are four types of context clues that the students can utilize: semantic, syntactic, picture and internal clues. When using the internal clues, the reader should try to unlock the meaning of a word based on the morphemes, which are the smallest unit of meaning. Thus, he should be able to identify prefixes, suffixes, combining forms, and word roots, as well as know their meanings (Thomas and Robinson, 1982; Otto et al., 1979; Morrison, 1979; Robinson, 1977). In addition to internal clues, such picture clues as drawing, photographs, graphs, diagrams, and others may provide clearer description of the content of reading materials and consequently aid comprehension (Harris and Sipay, 1980). These two, however, are not included in the study. Only syntactic and semantic clues are examined in the study since they are linguistic in nature.

Syntactic clues involve implicit knowledge of word order and the function of words (Harris and Sipay, 1980). Robinson (1977) classifies these syntactic clues into three, namely:

1. Patterns and functions of words, e.g. His truculent criticism of your painting betrayed some jealousy. By looking at the position of the word, the reader can judge that the word modifies a noun and therefore it is an adjective. This can limit the choice of meaning he is going to make.
2. Inflectional clues, e.g. Mrs. Ames scrounged around the empty lot for sharp objects.The inflection -ed shows that scrounged must be an action (a verb) indicating what Mrs. Ames did in the past.
3. Markers.A verb marker (was, had, will, etc.), for example, indicates that a verb follows. A noun marker (the, a, an, etc.) shows that a noun follows, e.g. They were jubilating about his amazing recovery.

1. Definition, e.g. An object lesson--concrete illustration of a principle--was obviously learned today.
2. Examples, e.g. Methadone is an example of a synthetic narcotic drug.
3. Synonym, e.g. The fat giant was large and round and rotund.
4. Experience, e.g. After school Dick hung his clothes in the closet.
5. Description, e.g. The griffin was a mythological monster with an eagle's wings, head, beak, and a lion's body, legs and tail.
6. Comparison or contrast, e.g. While the aunt loved Marty deeply, she absolutely despised his twin brother, Smarty.
7. Reflection of intent, mood, tone or setting, e.g. The starchiness in his voice and the scowl on his face warned us that father was in a captious mood. Absolutely nothing suited him! Dinner was too late, the meat was too cold, and the coffee was too hot.

Further, Carnine et al. (1990) give a description of how these two operate in the word attack. According to them, a reader relies on the syntax (word order) and semantics (word meaning) of the sentence in which a word appears as an aid to decode the word. The first type of context clues, syntax (word order), limits the number of possible words that can come next in a sentence. Thus, syntactic clues allow him to make inferences regarding the possible word. For example, the next word in the sentence 'John ran to the _____' might be any of several nouns (e.g. store, station), but could not be a verb (e.g. shave), adverb (e.g. slowly), or pronoun (e.g. she). Then the second type of context clues, semantics (word meaning), limits the number of possible words that can come next in a sentence. To illustrate, although the next word in the sentence 'Alice threw away the _____' must be a noun, only certain nouns make sense (e.g. cup, old clothes, etc.), but not others such as Jerry, railroad, etc. Since context clues (semantic and syntactic) restrict the words that can come next in a sentence, students are more likely to be able to figure out the unknown meaning of a word in context than when it appears in a list of words.

Methodology

0 = the meaning guessed by the subject is completely incorrect
1 = the guessed meaning is not completely wrong, but resembles the intended meaning very little
2 = the guessed meaning is almost correct, and very close to the intended meaning
3 = the guessed meaning is correct

Before the second test was administered to the subjects, it was tried out to determine the difficulty level of each item, to estimate the reliability and the validity of the test, and to decide the time allocation. Some items turned out to be too difficult for them due to either (1) the lack of context in the reading passage or (2) the context which contained too difficult vocabulary and sentences. Consequently, some passages were replaced or simplified. Prior to revision, the reliability of the test was low. However, it improved significantly after the passages were revised. The reliability of the syntactic clues sub-test was estimated by means of KR20 formula, while Coefficient Alpha was applied to the semantic clues sub-test. The result can be summarized as follows:

• Syntactic subtest, try out: r = .34 (low)
• Semantic subtest, try out: r = .14 (very low)
• Syntactic subtest, data: r = .62 (moderate)
• Semantic subtest, data: r = .63 (moderate)

Both the test of words in isolation and in context were administered to the subjects on the same day successively, and it took approximately 60 minutes. After that, the answers to the test were evaluated, resulting in data in the form of scores.

To analyze the data, the following procedure was done:

1. Tabulate the subjects' scores of the syntactic clues sub-test.
2. Compute the mean of the scores to get a general idea of their ability to use syntactic clues.
3. Compute the mean of the scores that they got for each type of syntactic clues to determine how much they used that certain type.

Findings and Discussion

It has been mentioned that the students are successful in using syntactic clues to identify the part of speech of the unfamiliar words in the reading passages. Although at first they do not have any idea about the meaning of a certain word, they can recognize the word as a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb.

Of the four types of syntactic clues, word order turns out to be the most helpful one (M = 56.22). By examining the way the words are organized in a sentence, they can guess the class of this word. They can infer that the word pitch (Text no. 7) is a verb by examining the order in which this word is put in the sentence 'He must be able to pitch his tent and know how to go about preparing the camp site.' They give special attention to the phrase be able to pitch his tent, where pitch is located between the verb phrase be able to and the object his tent. They possess sufficient grammatical knowledge to recognize that (1) be able to must be followed by a verb, and (2) the object his tent must be preceded by a predicate in the form of a verb. As a consequence, they draw a deduction that pitch between be able to and his tent is a verb.

Another type of syntactic clues that is crucial in this process is function word (M = 26.62). The use of function word may be found, for instance, in Text no. 2 where the students are required to guess the class of the word fracture. The word is written in a sentence which reads 'If there is a fracture, try to support it with a bandage or a piece of cloth.' Most of them are able to identify fracture as a noun by looking at the function word a. They know that this function word can only be associated with a noun.

Inflection--a process of adding affixes in words without necessarily changing the part of speech of the word--is also utilized by some of the students (M = 10.14), although it is not as much as the previous two syntactic clues. As an illustration, the word eradicated (Text no. 12) can be easily recognized as a verb from the inflectional suffix -ed that is attached to the base eradicate.

Some other students take advantage of a process similar to inflection, namely derivation (M = 7.02). Like inflection, derivation involves adding affixes to bases. The difference is that these affixes change the part of speech of the word. The word irksome in Text no. 5 is the result of this process. The suffix -some is a morpheme that can form adjectives, such as in the words handsome, troublesome, etc. The students then conclude that irksome must be an adjective.

It is important to note that the students do not use these four types of syntactic clues separately. Occasionally they combine two or three types in order to provide stronger evidence for their deduction about the word class. After they succeed in performing this, they turn to the semantic clues in order to guess the meaning of the words.

They appear to face more difficulties in deducing the meaning of the words than labeling their part of speech. They do make an effort to use the semantic clues scattered around the unknown word. Yet, sometimes they fail to get the exact or actual meaning of the word. They could guess only 49.85% of twenty words in the test. However, this number can be regarded as sufficient if it is compared to the result of similar study by Ittzes (1991). She finds that her students could guess 56% of unknown words. This fact indicates that it may not be possible to expect the students to infer all of the unknown words successfully. Their rate of success in guessing probably lies around fifty percent of unknown words that are given, and it can be a little less or more than that. There must be some words that they misunderstand or are unable to guess. Their attempt to infer the meaning of kennel (Text no.1) can illustrate this.

The complete sentence is 'He had a good kennel in his house where he reared different types of dogs.' Some students can get the meaning that is close to the original one, such as place for dogs, kandang anjing, or rumah-rumahan untuk anjing. They arrive at this meaning by reading the phrase where he reared different types of dogs. This phrase leads them to think kennel as a sort of place to rear dogs. Probably they then relate this tentative meaning to their past experience; a place to rear dogs can be kandang anjing in the form of a big cage made of wires or rumah-rumahan untuk anjing which is a small, house-shaped cage made of wood.

Some other students, however, take the wrong clues and as a consequence fail to infer the right meaning. They think that kennel is a kind of dog by taking the phrase different type of dogs as the clue. By concentrating on this phrase, they conclude that Mr. Jones (the person told about the text) rears different types of dogs, and one of them is a kind of dog called kennel. The fact that they miss the correct semantic clues, therefore, clearly obstructs them to get the meaning.

Even if they get the appropriate clues, sometimes they misunderstand the meaning of the clues, resulting in an incorrect meaning of the guessed words. This can be seen in their effort to attain the meaning of smog (a mixture of dust, smoke, and fog in the air). One of the students includes the words 'dust, smoke, and fog' in his answer sheet. However, he might misinterpret smoke. According to the context in the passage it actually relates to asap but he thinks it is rokok. Consequently, he writes the meaning as kabut dan rokok. Even though the clues become the potential source in assisting the student to attack word meaning, the misinterpretation of these clues makes the students fail in the word attack.

Certainly not all of them fail; some can achieve the correct meaning by relying on the semantic clues. The types of semantic clues they use can be listed in ascending order as follows:

1. Experience (M = 49.33), e.g. He had a good kennel in his house where he reared different types of dogs.
2. Comparison-contrast (M = 13.79), e.g. The experience was a novelty to me but it was very irksome after a few days when a number of doctors, one after another came and examined me.
3. Example (M = 13.68), e.g. To enjoy camping, one must be familiar with forest crafts. For instance, one must enjoy walking, be able to climb trees and hills, be satisfied with simple food which he has to prepare, and revere the habitat of animals.
4. Description (M = 9.86), e.g. I never thought I would be going in for a protracted illness. That evening, I had some temperature and pain in the joints. The next morning I could not get up at all from bed. I was running a high temperature and more severe pain in the joints. Still they did not send me to the hospital. I was kept on sparse diet. The same condition continued for three more days, so our family doctor and friends advised my parents to get me admitted to the General Hospital. After the formalities, I was given a bed in the general ward and I was kept under strict observation.
5. Mood (M = 5.16), e.g. There are people who insist on the weekend because they need rest after an arduous and taxing week. The rest will refresh them, and some freedom from the frame of timetables and discipline is desirable for the organs.
6. Synonym (M = 5.04), e.g. If the victim is about to swoon from bloody wound give some cold drinks, never any hot drinks. In the case of an ordinary fainting, some hot coffee may be helpful.
7. Definition (M = 3.14), e.g. Dust particles and smoke in the air act as nucleus for the water vapor in the atmosphere to condense and form what is called 'smog.'

The statistical analysis proves that syntactic and semantic clues are moderately related, indicating the rate of success in inferring word meaning does not rely too much the ability to identify word class, although the later does help the former to a certain degree. Thus, it conforms tot the statement pointed out by Carnine et al. (1990). They propose that syntactic clues can narrow down the possible meanings at first, and then semantic clues specify the meaning further.

However, the relationship between the two is not very strong, and this can be due to the different level of difficulty in using the two types of context clues. For advanced readers, labeling parts of speech is not a demanding task compared to inferring word meaning. The subjects have passed structure and morphology courses so they possess relatively thorough understanding of the grammar and morphemes in a sentence. Consequently, they can easily identify the syntactic clues which are quite obviously written there.

Inferring word meaning, on the other hand, involves a more complicated process. After the students find the class of a certain word by employing various types of syntactic clues, they have to perform a somewhat different strategy in order to get the meaning of this word. This time they make use of the clues derived from the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences surrounding the unknown word. Their success in utilizing this strategy depends on two factors. One of them is the vocabulary size of the students. Although they can identify the word class, they will not be able to get the meaning of the word if the density of the difficult vocabulary is too high. On other words, when there are too many words in the passage that are not familiar to the students, this might obstruct them in their attempt to infer the meaning of the unknown word.

Even if they know the meaning of surrounding words, phrases or sentences in the passage, the possibility of incorrect guesses still exists. They might fail to arrive at the right meaning because they take the wrong clues in deducing meaning, as in the case of the word kennel previously mentioned. All this provides probable explanation as to why the good performance in syntactic clues does not guarantee the success in using semantic clues.

Conclusions and Suggestions

Therefore, it is suggested that teachers give more emphasis on the use of semantic clues in reading classes. They need to give some instructions on how to attack unfamiliar words, and let the students to perform intelligent guess whenever encountering such words. Hopefully by using this vocabulary strategy their comprehension will be improved.

References

Carnine, D. et al. 1990. Direct Instruction Reading. Ohio: Merril Publishing Co.

Carrell, P.L. 1988. Schema Theory and ESL Reading Pedagogy. In P.L. Carrell et al. (eds.). Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grellet, F. 1990. Developing Reading Skills: A Practical Guide to Reading Comprehension Exercises. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harris, A.J. and E.R. Sipay. 1980. How to Increase Reading Ability. New York: Longman.

Hill, W.R. 1979. Secondary School Reading: Process, Program and Procedure. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Ittzes, K. 1991. Lexical Guessing in Isolation and Context. Journal of Reading, 34:5.

Kusumarasdyati. 1992. The Effects of Sentence Length and Word Frequency on the Readability of Texts. Malang: Unpublished Thesis.

Morrison, B.S. 1979. One Route to Improved Reading Comprehension: A Look at Word Meaning Skills. In C. Pennock. Reading Comprehension at Four Linguistic Levels. Newark: International Reading Association.

Nagy, W.E. 1988. Learning Words from Context. Reading Research Quarterly, 20:2.

Nation, P. and J. Coady. 1988. Vocabulary and Reading. In R. Carter et al. (eds.) Vocabulary and Language Teaching. London: Longman.

Nattinger, J. 1988. Some Current Trends in Vocabulary Teaching. In R. Carter et al. (eds.) Vocabulary and Language Teaching. London: Longman.

Otto, W. et al. 1979. How to Teach Reading. Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

Robinson, H.A. 1975. Teaching Reading and Study Strategies: The Content Areas. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Rumelhart, D.E. 1980. Schemata: The Building Blocks of Cognition. In Spiro et al.. (eds.). Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension: Perspective from Cognitive Psychology, Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and Education. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Thomas, E.L. and H.A. Robinson. 1982. Improving Reading in Every Class. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Turner, T.B. 1988a. Comprehension: Reading for Meaning. In J.E. Alexander. (ed.). Teaching Reading. Glenview: Scott, Foresman and Co.

Turner, T.B. 1988b. Higher Levels of Comprehension: Inference, Critical Reading, and Creative Reading. In J.E. Alexander. (ed.). Teaching Reading. Glenview: Scott, Foresman and Company.

Appendix A: Sample of Test of Words in Isolation.

1. 'Kennel' means _________________
2. 'Oozing' means _________________
3. 'Fracture' means ________________
4. 'Swoon' means _________________

Appendix B: Sample of Test of Words in Context.