A Study On The Use Of Lexical Inferencing Strategies In English Reading By Chinese High School EFL Students

The use of lexical inferencing strategy in reading has been an important researchtopic in the field of vocabulary acquisition, since it can help students acquirevocabulary in an effective way. In fact, many researchers have explored lexicalinferencing strategies from various perspectives. However, a majority of themconducted researches on ESL contexts and rarely with high school students. Besides,many studies explored the relationship between lexical inferencing strategies andlearner factors but very few touched upon the factor of gender difference.This thesis intended to find out the characteristics of knowledge sources used inlexical inferencing strategies, the effect of gender difference on the choices ofstrategies as well as the effectiveness of inferencing strategies on promoting readingproficiency. In order to address the above research questions, we’ve conducted aresearch consisting of a questionnaire, a case study and lexical inferencing strategytraining. Two intact classes, all together110students, from a high school in JiangxiProvince, were involved. In the study, data were collected with the help of the Englishteacher and were analyzed by SPSS19.0.The results revealed:(1) Chinese high school EFL learners use a variety ofknowledge sources in inferring meanings of target words, ranging from linguistic(intra-lingual and inter-lingual) to non-linguistic. The three kinds of most frequentlyused clues are discourse-level meaning, followed by formal schemata, and sentencemeaning;(2) Female use multiple sources more often and show more variation thanmale. Female students rely more on word level clues and less on discourse level cues,compared with male students.(3) The use of lexical inferencing strategy can improveEFL students’ reading comprehension. This study suggests potential implications forhow to acquire and teach vocabulary effectively.