The Effect Of Senior High School Students’ English Reading Proficiency On Their Processing Of English Lexical Inferencing

English discourse reading is a way to expand vocabulary.Lexical inferencing,a common method to handle new words in reading,is conducive to understanding the meaning of vocabulary better and enhancing comprehension skills.Previous studies focus less on the effect of senior high school students’ English reading proficiency on their English lexical inferencing processing,so this study is needed.On the ground of Constructivism and second language lexical processing model,this study employed introspective research and interview,and took 209 grade-three students from five classes in a senior high school of Zhangzhou City as the subjects and a total of 9 students as the interviewees randomly selected from three groups with different English reading proficiency,to explore the following questions:(1)How is the lexical inferencing processing of senior high school students?(2)What is the correlation between the English reading scores and the scores of lexical inferencing?(3)What is the effect of English reading scores on the effectiveness of English lexical inferencing(strategy use and lexical infrencing scores)?The results manifest that: 1)Various lexical inferencing strategies are used by students during their lexical inferencing process,including linguistic cues and non-linguistic cues,the former being more frequently used(98.44%)than the latter(1.56%).Within the linguistic strategies,sentence-level cues are the most frequently used(37.85%),discourse-level cues the second commonly used(30.30%),vocabulary-level cues the third commonly used(29.57%)and cross-textual level cues least(2.28%).The average score of lexical inferencing for students is 28.06.2)The English reading scores are positively correlated with the scores of lexical inferencing(r=0.674).In other words,the higher English reading scores are,the higher the scores of lexical inferencing,and vice versa.3)The advanced,intermediate English reading proficiency groups share a similar pattern of relative frequency in using these cues,and the order of frequency of using cues is: sentence-level cues > discourse-level cues >word-level cues > cross-textual level cues > world knowledge.For low-level counterparts,the order of frequency of using cues is: sentence-level cues > word-level cues > discourse-level cues > cross-textual level cues > world knowledge.The average score of lexical inferencing for the advanced English reading proficiency group(35.46)is much higher than that for the intermediate(27.24)and that for the low proficiency group(21.39).There is a significant difference in the scores of lexical inferencing among the three groups(Between every two groups p=0.000).English reading scores can predict 45.5% of the scores of lexical inferencing,and regression estimation model is: y=4.158+1.102 x.Based on the above research results,the author puts forward English vocabulary teaching suggestions from 3 aspects: to nurture the awareness of using lexical inferencing strategies,to integrate lexical inferencing strategies teaching into various activities,and to infiltrate lexical inferencing strategies in reading teaching.