Xie Jiaru, Class 16, Senior 1, Shenzhen Xin’an Middle School Instructed by Yang Liuqing, Tang Ying

    深圳市新安中学高一（16）班 谢嘉汝 指导老师：杨柳青 汤颖

    In the latest class, we learned a new strategy called “guessing intelligently

    （猜测法）” from Tang Ying.

    When we are listening and reading, we always see some new words and sentences that are difficult for us to understand. Do we need to understand every word’s meaning? No.

    But what should we do when we are in such a situation?

    “Guessing intelligently” is a good method. You can actually understand a lot of language through systematic guessing, without necessarily understanding all the details. Guessing intelligently helps you handle ambiguity. How do you guess by using linguistic clues? Guess the situation and the relationship of the people based on the words used.

    Here is an example: If you listen to a dialogue and hear the following words: “shovel, grass, mower and lawn,” you will think of “gardening.”

    You can guess the meaning of new words by looking at suffixes and prefixes. Let us look at “carelessness.” “Care” is familiar. “Less” is the same as “useless,” a suffix expressing “not.” Remember the word “illness” we know that “ness” is a suffix turning a word into a noun. Finally you know what “carelessness” means. It’s fun.

    We can combine these methods to “guess intelligently.” Guessing happens whenever you are reading. For example, when you see a story that begins with “Tom got up early and had breakfast in a hurry. He ran to the bus stop.” Maybe you will guess that he will catch the bus or miss the bus.

    The ability to guess is very important when learning a language and it is especially important when reading, speaking and listening.