Influence Of The Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge On The Use Of Lexical Inferencing Strategies By Chinese Non-English Majors

This study is designed to explore the influence of the depth of vocabularyknowledge (DVK) on Chinese non-English majors’ use of lexical inferencingstrategies in English reading comprehension. Two research questions were proposed:(1) Do students with different levels of DVK use different lexical inferencingstrategies in English reading comprehension? What strategies do students with adeeper DVK prefer and what strategies do their weaker counterparts prefer?(2) DoesDVK have a significant influence on students’ overall successful use of lexicalinferencing strategies? Do students with a deeper DVK use certain lexical inferencingstrategies more successfully than their weaker counterparts? If so, what are thoselexical inferencing strategies?95second-year non-English majors from Qingdao University of Science andTechnology participated in this study. A revised version of Read’s Word-AssociateTest was administered to measure the non-English majors’ depth of vocabularyknowledge. A lexical inferencing strategies test was carried out to test the students’use of inferencing strategies when they encountered unknown words in Englishreading comprehension. Data collected from the two tests were carefully analyzedwith the SPSS software.It is found that students with different levels of DVK use different lexicalinferencing strategies in English reading comprehension. Students with a deeperDVK use more word-association, discourse knowledge and world knowledge thantheir weaker counterparts, while students with a weaker DVK prefer to use more knowledge about homonymy and morphology, and sentence-level grammaticalknowledge. The study also shows that the depth of vocabulary knowledge has stronginfluences on students’ overall successful use of lexical inferencing strategies inlexical inferencing. Students with a deeper DVK make more effective use of all typesof lexical inferencing strategies than their weaker counterparts. However, whenstudents use the word-association strategy and the sentence-level grammaticalstrategy, the difference in their inferential success is not significant.