An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Lexical Inferencing Strategies Training On English Reading Comprehension Of Senior High School Students

The development of reading comprehension is considered as one of the most important competences in language learning. As a result, great importance is attached to English reading in senior high schools in China. However, most senior high school students have poor English reading performance and a great number of problems exist. Unknown words are considered to be the most difficult obstacles, which may set most students back in English learning. How to deal with the unknown words efficiently in reading is what senior high school students need urgently. Therefore, instructing students to derive meaning of unknown words by using proper lexical inferencing strategies becomes quite necessary. In the past several decades, many researchers have explored lexical inferencing strategies from various perspectives. However, a majority of them conducted researches on the contexts of mother tongue or ESL contexts and rarely with senior high school students. Besides, many studies explored the use of lexical inferencing strategies in the field of vocabulary acquisition, but very few touched the relationship between lexical inferencing strategies and reading comprehension.Therefore, in order to explore the impact of lexical inferencing strategies on English reading comprehension of senior high school students, an empirical study was conducted, consisting of a lexical inferencing strategies training, with two reading proficiency tests, two reading motivation questionnaires and interviews as instruments. It tries to provide answers to the following two research questions:(1) Does lexical inferencing strategies training influence senior high school students' English reading proficiency?(2) Does lexical inferencing strategies training promote English reading motivation of senior high school students? Two intact classes, all together 102 students in a senior high school in Jiangmen City, Guangdong Province, were involved. In the study, data were collected and analyzed by SPSS 19.0 and Excel 2003. The audio recordings collected in the interview were transcribed into written words.The results reveals:(1) Lexical inferencing strategies training influences senior high school students' English reading proficiency significantly. The successful use of lexical inferenicng strategies can improve students' performance in reading comprehension. Students with different original English reading level all see improvement in reading proficiency test, and especially students belonging to the Middle Upper level have the greatest improvement.(2) Lexical inferencing strategies training promote students' English reading motivation, including intrinsic value of reading, utility value of reading, importance of reading and reading efficacy. After the Lexical inferencing strategies training, students' intrinsic reading motivation and reading efficacy have been greatly.Based on the results of the research, the author puts forward some potential implications for the teaching of English reading in senior high school in hope of improving the quality of the English reading class and students' English reading comprehension.