lexical inferencing

This study was intended first to categorize the L2 learners in terms of their learning style preferences and second to investigate if their learning preferences are related to lexical inferencing. Moreover, strategies used for lexical inferencing and text related issues of text density and parts of speech were studied to determine their moderating effects and the best predictors of lexical inferencing. To this end, a posttest group design with 142 students studying engineering was adopted for the study. Perceptual style preferences questionnaire was administered to identify the students’ major learning styles, followed by strategy training for deriving the meaning of unknown words. Finally, lexical inferencing texts were given to the students to study and extract the meaning of unknown words and concurrently determine the type of strategy used for lexical inferencing. The results indicated that a great proportion of students belonged to the kinesthetic category of styles while the predominant treatments in the class were audio-visually structured. The analysis also revealed that tactile, kinesthetic, and group categories of style preferences are meaningfully related. Moreover, it was found that learning style preferences lead to statistically different lexical ineferncing. As for the strategies, the ‘syntactic knowledge analysis’ showed the highest correlation with ‘auditory learners’. Lexical density and parts of speech were also shown to moderate the effect of perceptual style preferences on lexical ability. On the whole, strategy and perceptual style preferences were found to be the two best predictors of successful lexical inferencing.

Lexical inferencing is one of the most important strategies in vocabulary learning and it plays an important role in dealing with unknown words in a text. In this regard, the aim of this study was to determine the lexical inferencing strategies used by Iranian EFL learners when they encounter unknown words at both text and sentence levels. To this end, forty lower intermediate students were divided into two groups. For the first group, a text with 10 underlined words was given and for the second group, the same underlined words were given in separate sentences. The students were supposed to read the text and the sentences and to guess the meaning of the underlined words. Then some lexical inferencing strategies were given to them to determine which strategies they used in guessing the meaning of unknown words. The results showed that they used different strategies like using local context and word association in lexical inferencing and also they were more successful at the text level than the sentence one. The results also indicated that they were strategic learners using their own strategies including translation and cultural background knowledge to guess the meaning of the unknown words.

This study, on the one hand, investigated whether or not strategies like Lexical Inferencing (LI) and Morphological Instruction (MI) can significantly affect English as a Foreign Language (EFL)learners’ reading comprehension, and on the other hand, it examined their effects on the learners’ vocabulary retention over time. For this purpose, 60 homogeneous EFLlearners were randomly assigned to two experimental and one control group each one consisting of 20 participants. After the pre-test, participants of the first experimental group received lexical inferencing strategy training for six 45-minute sessions. The second experimental group was also provided with morphological instruction for six 45-minute sessions and as for the control group, the participants followed their regular reading comprehension course without any specific strategy training. After the treatment, two post- tests with a short time interval were administered to the three groups and the obtained data were fed to different statistical tests to spot the probable differences among the three groups' first post- test performance as a measure of their learning differences and the second post-test performance as a measure of the learners’ vocabulary retention differences over time. Results of the paired t-tests for comparison of the within group differences showed that lexical inferencing instruction had statistically significant effect on EFL learners' reading comprehension development. On the other hand, it was found that morphological instruction had no statistically significant effect on EFL learners' reading comprehension development. The ANOVA analyses revealed that there was no statistically significant difference between the effects of lexical inferencing and morphological instruction on EFL learners' reading comprehension development. Furthermore, no significant difference was found between the effects of lexical inferencing and morphological instruction on EFL learners' reading comprehension development over time.

Research to date has commonly suggested that meaning inferencing through concordance lines can facilitate vocabulary learning. This facilitative role, however, may be subject to mediation by the expanded contexts of the target vocabulary item in concordance and accurate meaning inferencing. Of these plausible factors, the length of the co-text of vocabulary items in concordance context remains under researched. The present study investigated how inferencing in the context of three varying concordance lengths (i.e., two complete sentences, one complete sentence, and a truncated sentence) affect EFL learners' accurate inferencing and vocabulary gain. To this end, 66 upper intermediate learners were assigned randomly into three groups and were asked to infer the meaning of 63 unknown words over seven sessions (nine words each session). For each unknown word, three examples in three different lengths were selected. Results indicated that two complete sentence co-text led to more accurate inferencing and vocabulary gain. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed