ABSTRACT
Real Life Contexts Most of the written words which people encounter occur in a context-but that context is not necessarily a written sentence. We see many examples of single written words in our environment: shop names, road signs, street names, product names etc. All these examples are of written language embedded within specific, meaningful situations. A good example to illustrate this would be a railway station. Signs abound in such an environmental context TICKETS, TOILETS, TELEPHONES, TAXIS. We do not need a whole sentence to facilitate such
reading. This way to the ticket office’ may be very polite but it is probably redundant. The real world physical context, our real life intentions and our accurate word-reading skills combine to enable us to see the signs as meaningful. If we enter a large station we will actively seek for something that looks like a ticket office, but probably, more potently, for a sign TICKETS. Our ability to read single words accurately enables us to pick out the sign that we actively seek from all the others.
