Empirical Research Into Intermediate Chinese EFL Learners’ Use Of Strategies In Lexical Inferencing In L2Expository Reading

Lexical inferencing has been proved to be the main strategy used to deal withunknown words in L2reading, which involves various strategies and is influenced byvarious factors (Paribakht&Wesche,1999; Yuan,2011). The present study investigatesthe on-line process of lexical inferencing in L2reading by intermediate Chinese EFLlearners. It has focused on exploring what kinds of strategies are used in the lexicalinferencing, and how these strategies contribute both in general and in terms ofcontextual richness and parts of speeches of target words.Data in this study is collected through think-aloud protocols on18subjects, whoare all intermediate Chinese EFL learners selected from the same class in a university inXi’an. These subjects are required to read a short passage and attempt to infer14unknown words underlined, which belong to three types of contextual richness and threeparts of speeches. All their think-aloud reports are recorded and then transcribed, andthe analysis proceeds on four research questions:1) How successful is the learners’ lexical inferencing in L2reading?2) Whatkinds of strategies are used in lexical inferencing?3) What are the influences of the useof strategies on successful lexical inferencing?4) How are strategies used in terms ofcontextual richness and parts of speeches of target words?Through analyzing the data qualitatively with aids of statistical results, it has beenfound that:1) the ability of lexical inferencing by intermediate Chinese EFL leaners is atlow level since only19.73%of responses are successful;2) five kinds of strategies areused: sentence-level analysis, morphological analysis, discourse analysis, worldknowledge and L1knowledge;3) These five strategies contribute differently to thesuccess of lexical inferencing, among which the discourse analysis and morphologicalanalysis are associated with the highest means of success;4) contextual richness doesnot influence the use of strategies significantly, and in term of parts of speeches,subjects’ concepts and habits of learning influence their use of strategies.