EFL students’ lexical inferencing and its relationship to their reading proficiency: A Vietnamese university case
List of Authors
  • Nguyen Thi Anh Thu

Keyword
  • knowledge sources, lexical inferencing, reading proficiency, unknown words, think-aloud

Abstract
  • This study examines Vietnamese EFL students’ use of knowledge sources in lexical inferencing while reading an English text. The study also intends to find out if students’ level of reading proficiency would affect their successful inferencing. A reading proficiency test was given to participants to classify them into two groups of high-proficiency (HP) and low-proficiency (LP). Data consist of think-aloud protocols of 20 second-year English-majored students of a university in Vinh Long City, Vietnam, who attempted to infer the meaning of unknown words in a written text. Results reveal that students used a variety of knowledge sources for guessing unknown words, but not all students used all knowledge sources for their lexical inferencing. The findings also indicate that both HP and LP learners made a small number of successful guesses in attempting to infer the meanings of the unknown words, and that HP learners made more correct lexical inferencing than their LP counterparts, but the difference is not considerable. This study can inspire teachers, textbook writers, and students to attend more to different knowledge sources and lexical inference.

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