Towards Effective Reading Instruction for Chinese EFL Students: Perceptions and Practices of Lexical Inferencing

Abstract

This study examined a group of learners’ lexical inferencing strategy use, their vocabulary size, and their success in guessing word meaning. Participants responded to a questionnaire, and then performed a one-time reading of a short passage containing ten unknown words. A sub-sample of ten students participated in an interview. Four tests measuring their ability to recognize and recall form and meaning of the target words were used. Results revealed that (a) those who performed sufficiently in these tests used certain strategies more effectively than those who had relatively lower scores in these tests; (b) learners’ vocabulary size played a significant role in using context effectively, and learners with a larger vocabulary size made more correct lexical guesses than those with a smaller one; (c) learners presented the best scores in form recognition, followed by meaning recognition, recall of meaning, and recall of form, which showed a gap between receptive learning and productive learning of an unknown word. Follow-up individual interviews showed that these learners’ actual lexical inferencing practices in the reading experiment were in line with learners’ self-reported strategy, reinforcing the validity of the study.