The Inferencing Of Lexical Meanings Through Context In The Process Of Reading

Vocabulary is a critical factor that determines the outcome of a learner's foreign language acquisition. Reading is an important skill that all students need to have in order to be successful. The combination of reading and vocabulary acquisition may be a perfect marriage. Therefore, the present thesis is just concerned with this combination, and will focus on one of the most valuable aspects-Chinese learners' inferencing of lexical meanings of unknown words through context while reading English.Expanding students' vocabulary has always been the principal challenge of language teaching, but there is no consensus on how vocabulary should be taught. The traditional explicit and intentional vocabulary teaching is challenged by recent popularity of the incidental word learning (IWL) hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001; Laufer, 2003; Zahar, et al. 2001). However, experiments also reveal some problems with this hypothesis, and the main problem is the low rate of vocabulary acquisition in IWL (Nagy, 1997). One of the major factors that account for the problem is just the students' poor guessing ability (Gai, 2003; Laufer, 2003; Hulstijn, 1993).Text is a semantic network (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Hoey, 1991). Comprehension is a process in which the reader constructs meaning while interacting with text through the combination of prior knowledge and previous experience and other possible information. The process of vocabulary acquisition can be simplified into recursive stages that are usually referred to as semantization and the consolidation (Verspoor & Lowie, 2003). At the first stage, the formal characteristics of a word are matched with semantic content. Therefore, inferencing the correct meaning of an unknown word is of great significance to the successful acquisition, and vocabulary instruction has shifted from teaching specific words to training students' strategies in lexical inferencing. As a matter of fact, the inferencing of lexical meanings through written context has been investigated in studies of both incidental word leaming and intentional vocabulary learning (Fukkink, et al. 2001; Nassaji, 2006).In order to give a scientific evaluation on Chinese learners' guessing ability and the effect of context in lexical inferencing, and further offer some suggestions for vocabulary acquisition through reading and the lexical inferencing strategy training in China, this study is to explore the general guessing ability of Chinese learners with English as a foreign language (EFL) through context, and analyze the effect of textual factors and learners' factors that may influence the gains in students' lexical inferencing as well as the relationship of various factors to learners' performance in lexical inferencing through context.Therefore, five research questions concerning the issue of students' inferencing of lexical meanings from context were put forward in the present research:1).How successful is the learners' infereneing of lexical meanings of unknown words from context while reading?2) What is the effect of context on the learners' inferencing of lexical meanings from text while reading?3) What is the effect of textual factors on the learners' inferencing of lexical meanings from context while reading?4) What is the effect of learners' factors on their inferencing of Iexical meanings from context while reading?5) What kind of textual factors and learners' factors can predict the success of the learners' infereneing of lexical meanings from context while reading respectively?112 non-English major students from Shaanxi Normal University participated in the experiment, of whom 10 students performed the think-aloud activities. 10 unknown words were embedded in two different styles of texts, with five words in each. A repeated measure was selected for this investigation. All the research questions were explored through 1 experiment, 2 tests (without-context pretest and with-context posttest), and 2 surveys (a questionnaire task and a think-aloud task).All the data were analyzed by using SPSS 13.0 and the main findings are as follows:1) Of the total 1020 inferential responses, about 49% of the responses are successful, 20% are partially successful and 31% are unsuccessful. The general guessing ability of Chinese EFL learners is rather optimistic.2) The total score on the posttest (with context) is approximately 10 times that on the pretest (without context), and the significant effect of context on lexical inferencing is obvious.3) Of the four textual factors, paired-samples t-test and one-way ANOVA indicate that significant effect only occurs on the factor of text type. There is not significant effect on part of speech, morphological predictability, and frequency of occurrence of the target words4) Of the four learners' factors, two factors-English proficiency and reading comprehension have significant effect on gains in learners' lexical inferencing, while sex and guessing strategies reveal no significant difference.5) Categorical regression reveals that the four textual predictors could explain 82% of the variance in the transformed inferencing scores, with frequency being the most powerful predictor (.718), followed by text type (-.079), morphological predictability (.076), and part of speech (.037).Multiple regression indicates that all the 7 variables concerning learners' factors can predict 67% variance in the inferencing scores, with CET-4 being the most powerful predictor (.755), followed by semantic knowledge (-.313); background knowledge (.225); strategies (.221) and comprehension (.183). The other two variables concerning learners' factors-grammatical knowledge and textual knowledge possess no predicting power at all.This study is preliminary in its exploration of issues concerning Chinese EFL learners' inferencing of lexical meanings from context while reading, obtaining some first-hand empirical data. The results of this research lend empirical support to the guessing ability assumption as well as the positive effect of context in lexical infereneing, and offer some suggestions for teaching vocabulary (especially vocabulary acquisition through reading) and lexical inferencing strategy training in China.