A Study Of Chinese Students’ Lexical Inferencing Procedures In Reading Chinese And English

Inferencing is one of the important cognition in the process of reading. It is also regardedas the core of reading comprehension. Inferencing at the lexicon level plays a crucial role in thedevelopment of one’s vocabulary and discourse comprehension. However, few studies havespecifically focused on this important cognitive process. In the present study, think-aloudmethod was employed to examine the lexical inferencing process when participants deal withChinese (L1) and English (L2). The thesis also discusses the relationship between the lexicallevel of L2learners, their success in guessing word’s meaning and retention of these words. Tobe specific, the thesis will deal with four questions:1) the difference of activation of knowledgeuse between Chinese (L1) and English (L2) lexical inferencing;2) results of inferencing successin L1and L2lexical inferencing;3) retention of new second language word knowledge throughlexical inferencing;4) relationship between the lexical level of L2learners and lexicalinferencing and lexical retention.To answer these questions, the present author designed the parallel experiment materials inboth Chinese and English lexical inferencing. All participants of this experiment aresecond-grade English major college students at Ningbo University. Think aloud method wasused in the experiment. Interviews are also used to get complementary results. The results of theexperiment are as follows:1) Participants take advantage of miscellaneous knowledge resourcesto guess the meaning of words, including world knowledge, discourse knowledge, pragmaticknowledge in sentential level, lexical collocation knowledge, syntactic knowledge and so on. Ofall these knowledge, pragmatic knowledge in sentential level is most frequently used in L1andL2. Participants need more lexical knowledge resources to guess the meaning of words in theprocess of L2lexical inferencing.2) Success of lexical inferencing in L1is much higher thanthat in L2, which indicates that there exists difference in terms of lexical guessing ability in L1and in L2.3) Successful lexical guessing is conducive to better understanding and temporarymemory of the meaning of words. The experiment also shows that participants gain word-formfamiliarity most.4) Lexical knowledge is much correspondent with successful word meaning guessing and word meaning retention. In other words, learners with higher lexical level enjoyhigher success rate of word meaning guessing and word meaning retention. And vise versa.The results of the experiment are expected to contribute to lexical inferencing study inChina and lexical teaching. Theoretically, the research discloses the lexical inferencing modelsin Chinese and English, which are quite distant in terms of language, and thus, further theresearch in lexical inferencing and construction of L2lexical comprehension and processingmodel. Pedagogically, the result of the experiment will shed light on teaching of L2vocabularyand teaching of L1vocabulary in teaching mother tongue to foreigners.