An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of L2 Proficiency On Lexical Inferencing Performance

This study is aimed at examining the impact of learners’ L2 proficiency on lexical inferencing performance from the perspectives of lexical inferencing success,usage of knowledge sources in lexical inferencing process and vocabulary acquisition as a result of lexical inferencing.More specifically,four research questions will be answered in this research: 1)Is there any relationship between L2 proficiency and lexical inferencing performance? If so,how to describe the relationship? 2)What is the effect of L2 proficiency upon lexical inferencing success? 3)What is the effect of L2 proficiency on the usage of knowledge sources employed in lexical inferencing? 4)How could lexical inferencing by learners of different L2 levels lead to incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)?To answer the four research questions,an experiment was carried out with a pretest,a lexical inferencing test and a post-test.Ninety-nine students were selected from a university of a northwestern province in China.However,after excluding invalid subjects,finally,eighty-two students were chosen as subjects.On the basis of their scores of Vocabulary Levels test,subjects were classified into two different proficiency groups.Research instruments include Vocabulary Levels test,Lexical Inferencing test and Vocabulary Acquisition test.Pearson correlation and between-group t-tests were carried out to analyze the test results.The findings of this research are presented here: 1)There exists significant moderate positive correlation between L2 proficiency and lexical inferencing performance.Second language proficiency significantly affects L2 learners’ lexical inferencing performance.2)The high proficiency learners made more reasonable inferences than the low proficiency learners.3)The two proficiency groups share general similarity in types of knowledge sources employed in lexical inferencing except inter-lingual knowledge used once only by the high proficiency level group.However,the group high proficiency used more diversified knowledge sources toconstruct the meaning of unknown words than the group low proficiency.4)Furthermore,meaning-oriented lexical inferencing could contribute to the meaning-plus-form-oriented vocabulary acquisition.The results of the investigation are discussed.From the discussion,it is concluded that L2 proficiency,as an important factor,affects lexical inferencing performance in reading context for L2 learners.Firstly,with increased proficiency in the L2,L2 learners become more successful in making reasonable lexical inferences.Secondly,with higher L2 proficiency,L2 learners employ knowledge sources more flexibly in lexical inferencing.Thirdly,lexical inferencing can significantly aid in learning new vocabulary.