An Empirical Study On The Use Of Lexical Inferencing Strategies In College English Reading Teaching

In this thesis,the researcher carries out an empirical study about the use of lexical inferencing strategies in college English reading teaching.Lexical inferencing strategy is often used in second language vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension which has been a hot topic for linguists since 1970 s.Various research results show that language learners can benefit a lot to acquire vocabulary from lexical inferencing strategies.However,most of previous researches mainly concentrate on the results of lexical inferencing,for example,the correlation between lexical inferencing strategies and second language proficiency,while this study pays more attention to the process of lexical inferencing.On the basis of language learning strategies,a model of reading by Khalif and Weir and framework of lexical inferencing strategies,this thesis tends to make clear of the following three questions:1)What’s the using frequency of lexical inferencing strategies among Chinese non-English majors? 2)What are the differences of using lexical inferencing strategies among different level participants? 3)What’s the correlation between the use of lexical inferencing strategies and vocabulary inferencing ability? In order to explore these three questions,this study carries out a research which is made up of a questionnaire,inferencing test,lexical inferencing strategy teaching and reading test.The 110 subjects are from two intact classes and they are junior studentsin Hunan University of Humanities,Science and Technology.In this study,the collected data were analyzed by SPSS 21.0 under the help of their English teacher.The research findings indicates that(1)Chinese non-English major students use various lexical inferencing strategies to get the exact meaning of new words,which range from linguistic(intra-lingual and inter-lingual)to non-linguistic knowledge sources.Among them,the three kinds of most frequently used strategies are discourse-level meaning,followed by sentence meaning and formal schemata;(2)The accuracy rate and efficiency of lexical inferencing used by high proficiency level students is higher than that of low level students.Both of two groups are used to adopting two knowledge sources to infer the new words,among them,the most frequently used strategy combination is discourse meaning and knowledge of topic,but high level students gain higher scores.Compared with the low level subjects,high level students are more likely to use the combination of three strategies,for example,combining discourse meaning,formal schemata with word morphology.(3)After a certain period of lexical inferencing instruction,learners’ knowledge of inferencing strategies is more systematic and all-around,and the use of lexical inferencing strategies has greatly improved learners’ vocabulary inferencing ability which provide some teaching implications for how to acquire and teach vocabulary effectively in English Class.Because of the limited time,all of the subjects are from the sameuniversity with same major,so whether the investigated results could represent the overall situation of Chinese non-English major students is still a question.What’s more,the number of lexical inferencing strategies is inadequate and the validity of the questionnaire still needs to be tested by further research.