A Relevance-based Analysis On Junior High School Students’ Lexical Pragmatic Inference Ability

Lexical learning plays an indispensable part in English learning. In recent years, studies at home and abroad mainly focus on factors or strategies that may influence lexical learning. However, in the review of a large amount of literature, the author found that the relationship between students’linguistic competence and pragmatic inference ability hasn’t been much explored in the available studies, especially concerning students in junior high school. As effective lexical inference ability contributes to effective lexical learning, the author considers it absolutely-necessary to further explore the relationship between the linguistic competence and ragmatic inference ability.In this study, two aspects are mainly focused on:one is "the relationship between the LC (linguistic competence) and LPIC (lexical pragmatic inference competence)" and the other is "specific problems existing in students’pragmatic inference". The objective of this study is to probe into how and what degree students’ linguistic competence might affect their pragmatic inference ability in lexical learning, meanwhile, the specific problems existing in students’pragmatic inference and the possible ways to improve ability are explored.Therefore, the study poses the following three questions:l.What is relationship between students’linguistic competence and pragmatic inference ability?2. What are the specific problems existing in students’pragmatic inference?3. What-are efficient ways to improve students’pragmatic inference ability?In order to answer above questions, a total of46subjects of Grade9-from one of junior high schools in Lanxi were chosen as the sample for the tentative study. The grammatical competence test and the pragmatic inference ability test are-taken as the instruments of the study, In order to ensure the control of validity, reliability, discrimination and difficulty of the test paper as well as an objective way to test students’English proficiency, samples of the grammatical competence test paper and the pragmatic inference ability test paper were drawn from yearly high school entrance examination papers. The collected data were analyzed through SPSS20.0and the analysis was conducted by means of descriptive statistics-test and correlation. The results concluded from the data provided by the investigation manifested the following:1. Students of different linguistic competence are different in their lexical pragmatic inference abilities.2. Students’ linguistic competence has high and positively correlation with their lexical pragmatic inference ability.3. The students who are more capable in lexical pragmatic inference are not necessarily more capable in their lexical pragmatic inference.4. The students who are less competent in grammatical competence are relatively less competent in pragmatic inference ability.5. The students achieved the lowest in the inference of familiar words with familiar meaning.Based on the results of the study, the possible factors affecting lexical pragmatic inference are analyzed from four perspectives:1. Negative transfer of prior knowledge of a familiar word2. Side effects of thinking set formed from students’ prior experience.3. Existing difficulties in inferring meaning from the context.4. Focused attention on isolated words.Finally, concerning the problems reflected in the study, the author provides some feasible suggestions for the further English vocabulary teaching and learning. On the one hand, the teachers should cultivate students’ strategies of lexical inference in vocabulary teaching; on the other hand, the teachers should strengthen students’ awareness of cultural differences between China and western countries. Only in this way can the students enhance their lexical learning.