An Investigation Of Non-english Majors’ Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge And Their Lexical Inference Strategy

Vocabulary is one of the most essential components of language learning. Teachers and researchershave long recognized that vocabulary knowledge is a reliable predictor of learners’ proficiency in a secondor foreign language (L2). With the deepening of second language vocabulary acquisition and secondlanguage vocabulary knowledge (VK) test, a great number of second language vocabulary acquisitionresearchers find out various but complementary vocabulary knowledge theoretical framework. The breadthand depth of VK are the core dimensions of lexical knowledge theoretical framework. Vocabularyknowledge is the basis of other language skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing. Meanwhile,vocabulary knowledge is widely considered as one of the most important factors affecting reading ability.On the other hand, inference is regarded as one of the central cognitive processes in reading comprehensionas well as the widely used strategy when dealing with unknown words in their reading for L2languagelearners. In the previous studies on L2vocabulary acquisition, most researchers tend to focus on therelationship of DVK and reading comprehension, only a small part of the study refers to the relationshipbetween DVK and inference strategies.The study was based on the theoretical basis of Qian’(2002) vocabulary knowledge framework andNassaji’s (2006) reclassification of the inference strategies, use40non-English major students in a collegeof Gansu Province as subjects to investigate the relationship between their DVK and their inferencestrategy. At the first step, the Word-Associate Test (Read,1993) was used to measure the learners’ DVK. Atthe second step, subjects read a passage containing10unfamiliar and attempts to derive the meaning ofthese words from context. The introspective think-aloud method was used to discover the types and successdegree of the inference strategy they used. The data were collected and processed by SPSS13.0softwarethrough the independent samples T-test, Pearson correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis.The following conclusions have been reached after the analysis: firstly, the analysis showed thatgenerally the learners acquired less than half of knowledge of those high-frequency words. It is far fromsatisfactory for the subjects to master the knowledge of these commonly used words. Secondly, the type ofinference strategy use is significantly related to DVK, the learners with stronger DVK used certain types ofinference strategy more frequently than those who had weaker DVK. Thirdly, the success of inference issignificantly related to DVK, the learners with stronger DVK used certain types of inference strategy moreeffectively than those who had weaker DVK. Fourthly, DVK made a significant contribution to inferential success, over and above the contribution made by the learner’s degree of inference strategy use.The data coming from the experiment shows that the depth of vocabulary knowledge and the use ofinference strategy can all influence the success of deriving meaning from unknown words. Therefore,students should try their best to make progress on their DVK, learn and use certain strategies to enhancereading ability. To the teachers and researchers, increasing the contact frequency of words to students is aneffective way to help them improve reading comprehension ability. Meantime, the data from the presentstudy also testify and supply some of the former researches.Finally, the article put forward the weak points of the experiment caused by the restriction of externalfactors both in the theory and practice aspect. At the same time, some suggestions are proposed for futureresearch on incidental vocabulary acquisition.