Strategies to infer meaning of unknown words in a text used by children in a secondary school in Tehuacán

"In Mexico, learning English has become essential because in the competitive job market, speaking English is not an option, but a necessity due the enrollment of students learning English as a foreign language in the formal education system. Thus, this project was conducted to determine how ten adolescent students were able to understand an A1 reading comprehension task through the use of context clues. The students were selected depending on their level of performance (high, medium and low). In this study, some of the reading comprehension strategies that the participants of this research use to infer meaning of unknown words are: the context, the use of the dictionary, the use of cognates, recognition of titles, studying vocabulary and teacher`s help. These strategies are explained and the results demonstrate the rate scale in which these strategies are used by the participants of the study as well.