6. Semantic mapping or clustering Readers can easily be overwhelmed by a long string of ideas or events. The strategy of semantic mapping, or grouping ideas into meaningful clusters, helps the reader to provide some order to the chaos. Making such semantic maps can be done individually, but they make for a productive group work technique as students collectively induce order and hierarchy to a passage.
7. Guessing This is an extremely broad category. Learners can use guessing to their advantage to:
• guess the meaning of a word,
• guess a grammatical relationship (e.g., a pronoun reference),
• guess a discourse relationship,
• infer implied meaning ("between the lines"),
• guess about a cultural reference,
• guess content messages.
8. Vocabulary analysis "One way for learners to make guessing pay off when they don't immediately recognize a word is to analyze it in terms of what they know about it Several techniques are useful here:
(a) look for prefixes (co-, inter-, un-, etc.) that may give clues
(b) look for suffixes (-tion, -tive, -ally, etc.) that may indicate what part of speech it is
(c) look for roots that are familiar (e.g., intervening may be a word a student doesn't know, but recognizing that the root, ven comes from Latin "to come" would yield the meaning "to come in between")
(d) look for grammatical contexts that may signal information
(e) look at the semantic context (topic) for clues
9. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings. This requires the application of sophisticated top-down processing skills. The fact that not all language can be interpreted appropriately by attending to its literal, syntactic surface structure makes special demands on readers. Implied meaning usually has to be derived from processing pragmatic information.
10. Capitalize on discourse market to process relationships There are many discourse markers in English that signal relationships among ideas as expressed through phases, clauses, and sentences. A clear comprehension of such markers can greatly enhance learners reading efficiency.
