The Role Of The Early Lexical Processing (Word Recognition) In EFL Reading

Reading study is always the focal topic of linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science and cognitive psychology. Since 1970's, with the development of rapid growth in the field of cognitive science and cognitive psychology and increasingly innovative teaching methods, studies about reading especially psychological process are concerned. For more than three decades, many reading studies have been conducted, which involves school. However, most of them in the research field of reading focused on inference process during reading instead of investigating the early lexical processing during reading.Reading starts from the very early lexical processing, which is no less complex than the whole reading task. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how the early lexical processing (word recognition) could influence reading for adult English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) readers (mainly for secondary school students) and explore some insights that it may have for theory and practice in English Language Teaching (ELT).To proof it, a study was conducted involving six students at Jiangxi Administration School. The data came from reading comprehension and interview. The influence is explored through three research questions: How did good and poor English readers perform in recognizing words? How did good and poor readers perform in the retention of the short passages? How did good and poor readers comprehend the passages?The results of this study reveal several facts. First, readers do not necessarily rely on every letter in order to recognize a word. Contexts do help readers determine word patterns. Secondly, when being requested to memorize the passages, poor readers tended to remember the physical forms of words only, but good readers tended to remember the meanings of the passages in addition to physical words. Thirdly, readers' speed of word recognition influences the speed of meaning retrieval and comprehension. It is found that poor readers could not finish the task of word recognition within time and their accuracy rates are quite low, whereas good readers processed the physical words immediately and translated them into meanings quickly in order to memorize the passage.