Items designed to measure the ability to derive the meanings of words from context (vocabulary-in-context items) were drawn from seven published reading tests. The items were administered to junior-and senior-high school students without the context. The percentage of students who marked the individual items correctly varied from zero to 91. In response to the average item 14% more students marked it correctly than would be expected to do so on the basis of random guessing alone. Only one published test had vocabulary-in-context items that were consistently context-dependent.
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