Effects Of Topic Familiarity And L2 Reading Proficiency On L2 Lexical Inferring And Retention Through Reading

Besides contextual factors, text processing and comprehension are also influenced by reader factors such as background knowledge, passage sight vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, reading proficiency and working memory during reading process. Although some researchers have explored the effects of reader factors on reading comprehension, there have been only a few researches investigating, in a controlled fashion, the effects of such reader factors on L2 lexical inferring and retention. Some researcher has recently investigated the effects of topic familiarity and passage sight vocabulary on L2 lexical inferring and retention through passage reading, finding that (a) topic familiarity and passage sight vocabulary have robust effects on lexical inferring, (b) passage sight vocabulary has robust effects on lexical retention, and (c) topic familiarity has a significant effect on lexical retention. In order to explore the effects of reader factors on vocabulary learning of Chinese L2 learners, the researcher tried to investigate the effects of topic familiarity and L2 reading proficiency on L2 lexical inferring and retention as well as the specific relationship between inferring and retention through passage reading. The empirical study has used instruments of questionnaire, tests and interview.Involved in the study were 62 English majors from Grades One, Two and Three in a college. After they finished all the tasks, their scores were resorted to the statistic package SPSS 15.0., and the data from the interview were sorted and analyzed to seek further evidence for the results got from the quantitative analysis. The research questions to be addressed in the study are in the following:1 What effects does topic familiarity have on L2 lexical inferring and retention through passage reading?2 What effects does L2 reading proficiency have on L2 lexical inferring and retention through passage reading? 3 What is the specific relationship between inferring and retention (translation production) after a verification task?The final analyses indicate that (a) topic familiarity has inconsistent effects upon L2 lexical inferring and retention. Topic familiarity has a significantly positive effect on lexical inferring but a significantly negative effect on lexical retention. Reading passages with familiar topics will enhance lexical inferring but reading passages with unfamiliar topics will better facilitate lexical retention; (b) as for the variable of L2 reading proficiency, the rich indeed got richer, revealing that it has consistently positive effects on both lexical inferring and retention; (c) the words with much higher correct inference scores were not finally remembered by most participants. However, the words with low correct inference scores were remembered by most participants.Based on the results, the researcher provided some suggestions for L2 vocabulary teaching: teachers should choose topics of reading materials for students according to the teaching goals. Because L2 reading proficiency positively affects L2 lexical inferring and retention, teachers should teach reading strategies in instructed language learning settings to increase students'reading ability so as to enhance their vocabulary learning. What's more, in case the students should ignore revising the words they have easily and correctly inferred, teachers should require students to finish some specific tasks to consolidate the previous learning results.