A Study Of Word-guessing Ability In English Reading Comprehension Of Non-english Major Students In Private Universities

In order to provide students with effective English language learning approaches, this investigation is focused on the means students deal with unknown words when they are doing reading materials. The research shows that most students can use some skills to guess the unknown words in reading materials, such as explanatory analysis skills, syntactic analysis skills and structural analysis skills. Most students have overlooked how words are organized metaphorically and metonymically. Language with metaphor or metonymy can create new constructions, new meanings, and new semantic domains. This investigation will provide students with the target language knowledge of metaphor and metonymy, to examine the impact on computer vocabulary guessing and reading comprehension through teaching the concept of metaphor and metonymy.In this research, 80 non-English major students will be divided into two classes, who are freshmen from several senior high schools in Zhejiang province. They have four classes every week during the term in this school. There are 41 students in Class One, which is defined as experimental class, while there are 39 students in Class Two, which is defined as the control class. English scores of these students in the University Entrance Examination in the two classes are roughly the same. So there is almost no obvious difference between these two classes and students’ proficiencies. An English reading comprehension of computer materials(40 total words) of a vocabulary guessing test is taken before the experiment at the beginning of this term.The new word guessing skill based on the knowledge of metaphor and metonymy is applied to word-guessing teaching in reading comprehension of computer material. This research is aimed to prove the hypothesis that the word-guessing skill based on the cognitive mechanism of metaphor and metonymy can produce a better result in understanding the meaning of unknown words in reading comprehension. Two research questions are studied in this experiment as follows:Question 1: What word-guessing skills do students usually use in the reading comprehension?Question 2: Can the training of using word guessing skills based on the cognitive mechanism of metonymy and metaphor improve students’ ability of word guessing in reading comprehension of computer material?The results show that through three months training of word-guessing skills based on the knowledge of metonymy and metaphor, there is a significant difference in scores of the post-test between these two classes(P=0.002<0.05). Mean scores of word- guessing in the experimental class is higher than that in the control class. In the control class, comparing scores from word-guessing pre-test and post-test P=0.108>0.05. As for the scores in the experimental class,P=0.000<0.05. Therefore, there is significant difference in scores of the pre-test and post-test for the experimental class, while there is no significant difference for the control class. It means the experimental class had improved their word-guessing ability generally. Students have gradually paid attention to the word-guessing skill in reading process. It means that the skills based on the knowledge of metaphor and metonymy have helped students get the right meaning of the unknown words in computer reading materials. It has really enlarged student’s vocabulary and improved their confidence in finishing reading.