Ten socially/emotionally maladjusted adolescents with language impairments (SEM/LI) and ten non-impaired adolescents received four treatment sessions in the use of a “context clues strategy” for facilitating comprehension of unfamiliar words in four sentence types. Both groups improved their ability to use a context clues strategy following direct instruction. The SEM/LI subjects exhibited greater difficulty with the appositive sentence type than did the non-impaired subjects. The results indicated that SEM/LI adolescents probably would benefit from receiving direct instruction involving any of the three other sentence types (i.e., cause/effect, example, grouping), prior to instruction involving the appositive sentence type.