A Study On The Differences Of Non-english Majors’ Lexical Inferencing

The reading difficulty has been a tough problem for English learners in China for a long time,when there are lexical difficulties in reading,the readability of the text will be greatly reduced.Research has shown that lexical inferencing can effectively overcome lexical difficulties and plays a very important role in understanding the meaning of the texts.The previous studies have proved that there are great differences in both the results of lexical inferencing and the use of lexical inferencing strategies among students with different English levels,but little attention is paid to students with the same English level,and the previous studies mainly focus on English majors.It’s also proved that vocabulary knowledge and lexical inferencing strategy both have a great influence on the results of lexical inferencing,but little attention is paid to the internal relationship between vocabulary knowledge and lexical inferencing strategy.So this research deeply explores the interaction,and focuses on the differences in the lexical inferencing strategies and results among students of the same level and the causes of these differences.Three research questions are to be addressed in the study:Question 1: What are the differences among students of the same English level in their lexical inferencing strategies and results?Question 2: What are the factors that cause the differences in lexical inferencing strategies?Question 3: What are the factors that cause the differences in the results of lexical inferencing?The research uses the Vocabulary Levels Test and the Word Association Format to obtain the data of their breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge,and uses the lexical inference material to obtain the results of their lexical inferencing.72 non-English majors with the same level of English are involved in this research,and 49 are valid for data analysis.SPSS 23.0 is used to conduct the analysis and major findings are as follows.First of all,the research confirms that students with the same English level use greatly different lexical inferencing strategies and achieve greatly different inferencing results.The differences in lexical inferencing strategies are caused by the characteristics of words and vocabulary knowledge.The differences in lexical inferencing results are caused by vocabulary knowledge and lexical inferencing strategies.Secondly,the breadth of vocabulary knowledge and the depth of vocabulary knowledge can both affect the use of lexical inferencing strategies.The students with a higher breadth of vocabulary knowledge are more likely to use context strategy alone or use all the strategies at the same time,while the students who choose the other two strategy types have a lower breadth of vocabulary knowledge.Students with a lower depth of vocabulary knowledge tend to use analogy strategy more than word-structure strategy.Thirdly,there are great differences in the results of lexical inferencing among different breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge,and the former is greater than the latter.Both breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge are positively correlated with the results of lexical inferencing,and the former is more significant than the latter.The researcher also uses multiple linear regression analysis to deeply analyze the contribution of the breadth and depth of English vocabulary knowledge to the results.With the increase of the breadth of English vocabulary knowledge,the improvement of the results also increases.So is the depth of vocabulary knowledge.Besides,there are great differences in the results of lexical inferencing among different strategy types.All the subjects have used the context strategy,but there is a difference among them in the use of the word-structure strategy and the analogy strategy,which causes the differences in their inferencing results.Fourthly,based on all the findings above,this research constructs an influence model of lexical inferencing for students at the same English level,in which the breadth of vocabulary knowledge,the depth of vocabulary knowledge and the lexical inferencing strategy are important independent variables,and the result of lexical inferencing is dependent variables.Besides,the breadth of vocabulary knowledge and the depth of vocabulary knowledge can influence the lexical inferencing strategy.At last,students who have the phenomenon of word misidentification have low breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and lexical inferencing results than the students without misidentification,and the difference in the depth of vocabulary knowledge is significant.Through the analysis and discussion of the research results,this research puts forward some teaching suggestions and inspirations.Although there are still limitations in this research,some suggestions are put forward for future studies.