A Study Of The Application Of The Strategy Of Contextual Clues To English Reading In Senior High Schools

Lexical inferencing is a strategy of understanding and tacking unfamiliar words encountered in the process of language use. And the strategy of contextual clues, which is one of the best common strategies in the lexical inferencing, plays an important role in understanding the discourse implications and constructing the discourse memory representation. It involved contextual clues and background structure clue. The present study explores the lexical inferencing process of senior high school students in the use of the strategy of contextual clues in English reading. And it is aimed at finding out the students’ differences in using the strategy of contextual clues, and the influence of the strategy of contextual clues on reading competence of high senior school students. Specifically, the present study addresses two questions: 1) What are the differences of the students at different levels in using the strategy of the contextual clues? 2) What effect does the strategy of contextual clues have on reading competence of senior high schools?The design of the research is descriptive and exploratory. It is intended to reveal the differences in the use of the strategy of contextual clues in the process of the lexical inferencing and the effect of using the contextual clues on reading comprehension. Subjects of the study were 60 senior high school students selected from two classes of 305 and 306 in Grade two in Yuanjiang No.4 Middle School. A total of 3 different tests were given to the participants in different time. The first test, VLT-Vocabulary Levels Test, was to select 60 subjects, at 4 levels, with 15 subjects at each level. The second test, The Reading Passages and the Lexical Inferencing Task(answer sheet), was given to 60 subjects selected and then got students’ scores in using the contextual clues and the background structure clue, which can solve the first question. The third test, RCT(Reading Comprehension Test), was given to 24 subjects in 3 groups, who have been selected according to their scores of the second test, namely, the group of CCs(Contextual Clues), the group of BSC(Background Structure Clue) and the group of both CCs and BSC. The results of this test were used to deal with the second question. The materials in the test were 4 reading comprehension passages and 1 cloze, all taken from Weekly English. The participants were required to read the articles firstly in the process of the second test and the third test, then inferred the meaning of each unknown word or finished the multiple choices questions.In the present study, the form of test scales was used, involving three forms, VLT(Vocabulary Level Test), The Reading Passages and The Lexical Inferencing Task(answer sheet), and RCT(Reading Comprehension Test). SPSS Statistics V21 was used as the analytic tool. More specifically, to determine the differences of senior high school students in using the contextual clues, Chi-Square was conducted, and to find out the impact of the contextual clues on reading comprehension ability, one-way ANCOVA were performed in two steps, including the normal distribution and the homogeneity of the variance, and then mean comparison. And then Spearman’s rho correlation was adopted.Through the research, on the one hand, it is found that there are significant differences in the use of contextual clues by senior high school students at different levels in the process of lexical inferencing task. That is to say, the students at the lower level used less contextual clues and more background structure clue while the students at the high level used more contextual clues and less background structure clue. These differences may be caused by the students’ differences in their cognition and familiarity of vocabulary. On the other hand, the strategy of contextual clues has positive effects on reading comprehension of senior high school students. That is to say, these students who have used the contextual clues and background structure clue can improve the ability of reading comprehension relatively.The present research has pedagogical implications for teaching in English reading: 1) Teachers can better know how their students use the strategy of the contextual clues to infer the unknown words, and this improves the teaching quality of reading class more effectively. 2) Students, when guided by the teacher, to a certain extent, can improve the reading speed and the accuracy rate in the reading comprehension tests.