Word-Guessing Strategies In L2 Reading By Indonesian Learners Of Chinese: An Investigation And Analysis

The guessing strategy in second language reading is one of the meta-cognitive strategies, which foreign language learners often use for better reading comprehension effects. The existing research findings indicate that the process of word-guessing is interacted by subjective and objective factors, and require learners to combine their mother tongue knowledge and background knowledge to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words. Therefore, the effect of learners' subjective awareness in second language reading is of great value to researchers.Based on the relevant research in TESOL at home and abroad and the results obtained from some small-scale word-guessing investigations in TCFL, this study applies theories of SLA, learning strategy, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics and several research methods, such as questionnaire survey, reading test, interview, error analysis and comparative analysis, to an investigation and analysis of the word-guessing strategies by Indonesian learners of Chinese, for the purpose of discovering differences and characteristics in word-guessing process through comparison between learners at varying levels. The ultimate goal is to find out how they adopt the strategy in reading and put forward some suggestions for the instruction of Chinese reading.The results of this study show that most of the Indonesian learners do not have enough confidence in word-guessing. They achieve various improvements in use of guessing strategy and Chinese characters, and in success rate of word-guessing, as they go on with learning of Chinese. On a whole, however, Indonesia learners' use and result of word-guessing need to be improved. Therefore, it is highly necessary to train guessing strategy according to the learner characteristics in materials compilation and instruction of reading so as to achieve better teaching results.