Effects Of Contextual Clues On Word Meaning Guessing In L2 Reading

This dissertation reports on a study that investigates, within the framework of Engelbart and Theuerkauf's (1999) theory of context, the effects of contextual cue and part of speech on the ease with which meanings of unfamiliar words are guessed by Chinese EFL learners at different proficiency levels.Drawing upon the ways of combining contextual clues as proposed in Mondria & Wit-de Boer (1991), 8 combinations of 4 contextual clues were first created. These 4 contextual clues were selected upon a careful analysis of the classfication scheme of context as proposed by Engelbart & Theuerkauf's (1999). They were: morphological clue, syntactic clue, semantic clue, and global clue.Seventy-six university English-majors participated in the study. Selected via a cloze test, they represented two proficiency levels, i.e., intermediate and upper-intermediate. Then they were required to take a computerized word guessing test, in which they were presented with reading passages containing various combinations of contextual clues. The test words were six nonce words (2 verbs, 2 nouns, and 2 adjectives) representing the concepts familiar to them, and the order of presentation was such that the reading passage containing only one contextual clue was presented first, and the number of clue would increase by one if participants failed to guess the unfamiliar word until the passage containing all 4 contextual clues was presented.The major findings of the study are as follows. (1) There seems to be no correlation between word guessing ability and language proficiency of a certain level, e.g., intermediate level, as indicated in the present study. (2) Participants were usually able to correctly guess the unfamiliar words with the help of any combination of 2 contextual clues. However, if they still failed to correctly infer the meaning of a word after all possible combinations of 2 contextual cues had been tried, then they were unlikely to figure out what the word meant even if they were provided combinations of more clues. (3) Part of speech of an unknown word appears to be unrelated to the ease with which the word can be successfully guessed. (4) The analysis of participants' think-aloud protocols reveals that they tended to draw upon morphological clue and/or global clue at the beginning of guessing. Syntactic and/or semantic clues would be resorted to only when their first attempt failed.The conclusion of the study is that Engelbart & Theuerkauf's (1999) theory of context can serve as a viable theoretical framework for examining the impact of contextual clues on L2 vocabulary acquisition. In addition, although language proficiency, part of speech of the unknown word, and number of contextual clues needed to guess a word are potential variables that may influence the result of word guessing, their effects may not manifest themselves in situations where concepts of the target words are familiar to learners, and/or the contents and language of the reading passages in which target words are embedded do not pose a challenge to learners.