Vocabulary Knowledge and Lexical Inferencing

Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2015

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of inferencing the meaning of new words from context on vocabulary retention by Iranian EFL learners. The participants were 67 Iranian university students of Tehran Islamic Azad University. They were sophomore English translation students who had enrolled in reading comprehension course in two different classes. To assign homogeneity, all students took language proficiency test. One group was assigned randomly as the control group (CG) & the other as experimental (EG). A pretest was administered to ensure that the new words were unfamiliar to them. During the 6 sessions of treatment, 48 selected items were exposed to the control group in the conventional way. (The vocabularies were taught through giving explanation, definition, synonyms or antonyms). But in the experimental group, the students inferred the meanings from the context and wrote down their inferences. Then, the surprised post-test was administered to both groups to evaluate their vocabulary retention. After applying t-test, the results showed that the experimental group did much better on the final test.

English Language Teaching, 2012

The present study investigated the effect of context on the strategies the EFL learners utilized to process idioms. To do so, ten Iranian intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to two groups who then attended a think-aloud session. The 5 subjects in the first group were exposed to an animated cartoon including 23 unfamiliar idioms while their counterparts in the second group were exposed to the written version of the same material. The subjects of the two groups were asked to verbally report their thought processes when trying to define the unfamiliar idioms. The data thus gathered form the small sample revealed 8 major strategies which were then used to prepare a questionnaire to be administered to a larger sample. The new sample included 60 subjects randomly assigned to two groups of 30.The first group as in the think-aloud session was exposed to the animated cartoon while the other read the respective script. The subjects in both groups were asked to check the strategies they resorted to when guessing the meaning of unfamiliar idioms. The results of the study showed both inter and intra-group differences confirming the effect of context on the strategies applied in processing unfamiliar idioms.

Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research, 2017

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the pivotal role of L2 words in language teaching and learning. Current research conducted in the field of second language learning has revealed that vocabulary learning techniques have an important role in learners' ability of producing meaningful output in L2 communicative encounters. Accordingly, the present study sought to investigate the impact of meaning-inferred method and marginal glosses on improving L2 lexical short-term and long-term retention of word meanings by intermediate EFL learners. 63 EFL learners at the intermediate level were selected based on convenient sampling method. A pre-test was administered to ensure that the learners did not know the target words. Based on the results, 13 students were eliminated from the study because they were familiar with some of the target words. Subsequently, 50 homogenous students were assigned to two experimental groups. While students in the first group were asked to infer the meaning of words through guessing, the latter group received meanings of words in marginal glosses. Finally, the same pre-test was utilized as the post-test which was followed by a delayed post-test to assess the efficacy of the targeted independent variables on vocabulary retention. The analysis of the data by applying a repeated measure ANOVA and the related post hoc comparisons indicated that learners benefitting from inferred-meaning method demonstrated significantly greater retention of words.

Journal of the European Second Language Association, 2017

When readers encounter new words they may try to infer their meanings from context. Such contextual inferences may be correct or incorrect. This research considered the effect of incorrect meaning inferences on contextual word learning in English as a second language. Chinese speakers encountered 48 novel vocabulary items in informative single-sentence English contexts and were instructed to infer their meanings. They were able to verify their inferences by reviewing dictionary-type definitions at the end of the learning procedure. Participants' explicit knowledge of the critical vocabulary items was probed using a meaning generation task; their implicit knowledge was examined using a mixed-modality masked repetition priming lexical decision task. The results revealed a differential effect of incorrect inferences on the explicit and implicit knowledge of the vocabulary items. Explicit knowledge of meaning was less accurate after incorrect inferences than after correct inferences, but it was not worse than the knowledge gained when no explicit inference had been made. Implicit knowledge however was not affected by incorrect inferences. Pedagogical and research implications of the study findings are considered.

English Language Teaching, 2013

This study investigated the strategies which first-year Saudi university EFL students used to derive the meaning of unfamiliar words while reading English texts. Using cluster sampling method, participants chosen to be included in the study consisted of six male and six female classes (120 male and 120 female students) of the preparatory year deanship students at King Saud University, 2009-2010. Following the administration of a vocabulary test as the instrument, descriptive statistics and ANOVA tests were used to analyze the collected data. Results revealed that the students were weak in using the right strategies in guessing the meaning of unknown vocabulary. The use of a combination of two or more strategies was found to result in a better correct guessing rate, but few students tended to use this technique. The results support the importance of practical training in when and how to use various strategies: students need to be given regular practice in order to learn how to use them most effectively. Highlighting the main strategies which students use to correctly derive the meaning of words, the findings indicate EFL teachers should train their students in the use of a variety of strategies for guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words.

Education and Linguistics Research, 2017

Meaning is the heart of language and it is its ultimate purpose; without the capacity to express meaning language is rendered as sequences of sounds or letters, and only when those sounds are judged capable of having a meaning do they qualify as language. Perceiving meaning does not solely depend on scrutinizing the literal sense of words, but it also comprises recognizing the meaning beyond language. From here, it can be inferred that when tackling meaning of utterances, two perspectives must be rendered: conceptual meaning, the literal or the core sense of a word also referred to as the denotative meaning and the associative meaning, which refers to aspects of the meaning that do not contribute to the denotation or concept of an expression and that do not change the range of possible referents (Murphy & Koskela, 2010). As a matter of fact, though English as foreign language learners, at the Lebanese University, do relish a wide vocabulary bank, and do know many of the words' meanings they encounter throughout their studies, they are, unfortunately, incapable of transferring their linguistic competence into semantic perception of comprehending the stylistic connotations of what they read. This can be traced to Lebanese University students' unawareness of the stylistic features of discourse which, in turn, is rendered as an impediment obstructing language processing. In this respect, via a comprehensive questionnaire, the study is meant to reflect a practical investigation on the perception of post graduates preparing for their master's degree in English at the Lebanese University, fifth branch, of stylistic features of words. The results depicted that stylistic features are not well perceived by EFL learners. Implications and recommendations for teachers, students, and curriculum designers were offered in the light of the study's findings.

2010

Words having multiple meanings cause dithculties in text comprehension because readers possibly interpret such words as the primary meaning even when the words are used as other meanings. The current study examined how Japanese EFL learners interpreted those words that were used as the secondary meanings in contexts when the panicipants knew the primary but not the secondary meanings. The results showed that there was no significant difllerence in the correct rate of interpreting homonyms between r.eading projiciency levels. However, the typcs of error they produced were different: the upper group wrote more answers that fitted the context than the lower group who stuck to the primary meanings even when they understood the target contexts. These results suggest that the bcttcr readers had grcater flexibility in changing their interpretation to one that fitted the contexts, but the poor readers persisted in assuming the meanings they already knew and could not change thcir interpretation.

The present study investigates the extent of multiple word meanings among the most frequent 9,000 words of the English language, which we refer here as the EFL lexicon. These include the high frequency vocabulary covering the most frequent 3,000 words as well as the mid-frequency vocabulary, which covers the subsequent 6,000 words in the 4,001 -9,000 frequency range. The meanings of 225 words randomly sampled from nine word frequency lists based on the British National Corpus were checked using the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries website. The results indicated that 64% of the words in the entire sample had multiple meanings. The percentage was much higher among the high frequency vocabulary (95%) but dropped to 48% in the mid-frequency vocabulary. The words had 2.49 meanings on average amounting to a learning load of over 22,000 meanings for the 9,000 words. The high frequency vocabulary had more meanings: 4 meanings per word, suggesting an even heavier load for lower proficiency learners for whom this vocabulary is a common first target. The extent of multiple meanings was greater in adjectives: there was a greater percentage of adjectives with multiple meanings (85%) and the number of meanings per word was also higher (2.93 meanings) warranting special pedagogic attention.

2008

Past research concerning how L21earnerS COmPrehend Englishidioms(e.g. throwinthetowel,Shootthebreeze)hasfbcusedonLltransfbrandstrategiesusedto processidiomswithsupportivecontext・ThisarticleinvestigateswhatstrategiesJapanese EFLlearners use tointerpret unfhmiliar Englishidioms and howthe presence andabsenceofcontexta飴ctsstrategyuse.Anexperimentwasconductedinwhich20 JapaneseEFIJlearnerSuSedtheThinkAloudProtocoltoguessthemean1ngSOf20unfhmiliarEng・1ishidioms,includinglOin supportive context andlOinisolation・TranscribedprotocoIswere dividedinto utteranCeunits,Whichwerethen analyzed as belonglngtOindividualstrategy categories・GuesslngStrategiesincluded uslng COnteXt, uslngtheliteralmeanlngOftheidiomphrase,uSlngJapaneseidioms,anduslngknowledgeofreal-WOrldthingsorevents・Ratesofuseofthelatterthreestrategieswereslgnificantlylower fbridiomsin context thanforidiomsinisolation・Correct response rates董bridiomsincontextwereslgnificantlyhigherthanthosefbridiomsinisolation, andparticipan七softenusedmu...