The Relationship Between Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge and L2 Learners’ Lexical Inferencing Strategy Use and Success

Abstract

The editors of both journals hope their readers will find this sharing of scholarship interesting and beneficial.This study examines the relationship between English as a second language (ESL) learners' depth of vocabulary knowledge, their lexical inferencing strategy use, and their success in deriving word meaning from context. Participants read a passage containing 10 unknown words and attempted to derive the meanings of the unknown words from context. Introspective thinkaloud protocols were used to discover the degree and types of inferencing strategies learners used. The Word-Associate Test (WAT) (Read, 1993) was used to measure the learner's depth of vocabulary knowledge. Results indicate a significant relationship between depth of vocabulary knowledge and the degree and type of strategy use and success. They reveal that (a) those who had stronger depth of vocabulary knowledge used certain strategies more frequently than those who had weaker depth of vocabulary knowledge; (b) the stronger students made more effective use of certain types of lexical inferencing strategies than their weaker counterparts; and (c) depth of vocabulary knowledge made a significant contribution to inferential success over and above the contribution made by the learner's degree of strategy use. These findings provide empirical support for the centrality of depth of vocabulary knowledge in lexical inferencing and the hypothesis that lexical inferencing is a meaning construction process that is significantly influenced by the richness of the learner's preexisting semantic system.

Mediational Role of Perceptual Styles in L2 Lexical Inferencing and the Associated Strategy Use

“…The findings are in line with the idea put forward by Nassaji (2006) that learners rely on certain modalities for facing the challenges as they are tackled through their inherent learning styles. Such individual differences give learners adequate knowledge and strategies to make use of contextual and extra-contextual clues in inferencing.…”

“…Nassaji (2006) defines inferencing as the attempts made by readers to extract meaning from a text. As a cognitive activity involved in the act of reading comprehension both in L1 and L2, inferencing is achieved through various strategies ranging from establishing connections between different parts of text and linking the text with background knowledge to looking for cohesion and coherence within the text as well as making informed guesses about the unfamiliar vocabulary items.…”

The Impact of Incidental and Intentional L2 Vocabulary Learning on Depths and Breadth Dimensions of Vocabulary Knowledge

“…Qian (1999) showed that this test has a high degree of internal reliability. The reliability of the test as reported by Read is 0.93 and by Qian (1998Qian ( , 2002 and Nassaji (2004) above 0.90. Different studies make clear that the test, moreover, having a high degree of correlation with the size of vocabulary knowledge, is closely correlated with L2 reading comprehension ability.…”

“…Several tools were proposed for measuring this dimension of vocabulary knowledge (sWesche & Paribakht, 1996) but one the most frequent used measure according to Nassaji (2004) to appraise the size of vocabulary knowledge is Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT).…”

Teaching and Learning Vocabulary through Reading as a Social Practice in Saudi Universities

“…Schmitt, 1997), others focused on particular strategies, such as guessing the meaning from context and using dictionaries (e.g. Nassaji, 2006;Chen & Truscott, 2010). Examining VLSs aim to help learners to be autonomous in their vocabulary learning and make them less reliant on teachers.…”