Chapter One Literature Review

1.1 L2 Vocabulary Acquisition and Reading

Undoubtedly, vocabulary acquisition is a complex process. Scholars haven’tcome to an agreement as to how to define one acquires a word. Almost every foreignlanguage learner once had such experiences: sometimes when we hear a certain word,we know its meaning, but can’t remember how to spell it; sometimes when we comeacross a word in reading passages, we know its meaning and spelling, but we seldomapply it into usage. The common experiences imply that knowing the meaning or thespelling of a word is far from enough. Acquiring a word requires one to grasp variousaspects of knowledge about it.Firstly, let’s look at the vocabulary knowledge. A word is a complex entity madeup of a set of properties and features. Chomsky (1975) viewed lexis as a set ofdictionary entries. Each of them contains syntactic, phonological and semanticinformation. It sounds a bit incomprehensive. The first and often cited attempt toarticulate comprehensive elements of vocabulary knowledge is usually attributed toRichards (1976: 77-89), who also concerns much the application of vocabularyknowledge into pedagogical practice. In response to the question, “what does it meanto know a word?” he proposed 7 assumptions respectively: frequency, register,position, form, association, meaning-concept, and meaning-association.

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1.2 Lexical Inferencing Strategies

As stated more than once before, vocabulary is an important and active part of alanguage. The mastery of vocabulary not only takes place in intentional learning ofschool, but also has to be accumulated over lifetime. What’s more, vocabularyknowledge knows no bound. Nobody dares to say that he has mastered all thevocabularies in a language, even in his mother tongue. However, for L2 learners, whatcan be done is to make use of certain strategies to speed up the acquisition of newwords.As for language learning strategies, R. Ellis (1994: 532-533) suggested thefollowing characteristics: (1) Strategies refer to both general approaches and specificactions or techniques used to learn a language. (2) Strategies are problem-oriented,and the learner employs a strategy to overcome some particular learning problem. (3)Learners are generally aware of the strategies they use and can identify what theyconsist of and they are asked to pay attention to what they are doing and thinking. (4)Strategies involve linguistic behavior (such as, pointing at an object so as to tell itsname) (5) Linguistic strategies can be performed in language learning. (6) Somestrategies are behavioral while others are mental. Thus some strategies are directlyobservable while others not. (7) In the whole, strategies contribute indirectly tolearning by providing learners with data about the second or foreign language theycan process. However some strategies may also contribute directly (e.g. memorizationstrategies directed at specific lexical items or grammatical rules). (8) Strategies usevaries considerably as a result of both the kind of task the learner is engaged in andthe individual learners’ preferences.

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Chapter Two Research Design

2.1 Research Questions

Three stages of research are adopted in the current study: questionnaire,interview and reading comprehension tests before and after lexical inferencingstrategy training. Based on the previous review, this chapter firstly put forward theresearch questions. And then the methodology including participants, instruments,data collection and analysis procedures is dealt with. Obtained data will be used forfurther analysis to answer the research questions. This study aims to probe how Chinese high school EFL students use lexicalinferencing strategies in reading as well as the relationship between strategy use andreading proficiency.The specific research questions are as follows:

1. Among the lexical inferencing strategies used by Chinese high school EFLlearners, which is/are the most and least frequently used?

2. What’s the relationship between gender and choice of strategies?

3. Does the use of lexical inferencing strategies promote reading proficiency?

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2.2 Subjects

The participants in this study are students from two parallel intact classes ofsenior one in a key comprehensive high school in Jiangxi Province. All of them havereceived formal school education of English for 6 years on average. Their age rangesfrom 14-16. There were 114 students in these two classes. However, results arereported only for 110 students for whom complete data are available: 19 girls and 39boys in Class A, 23 girls and 29 boys in Class B. The course design, the textbook usedand their English teacher are all the same. For the reading comprehension tests, validdata are collected from 50 students for each class.The four subjects participating in the case study were basically selected inrandom, but based on one criterion of one boy and one girl from each class. All fourparticipants were given pseudonyms to protect their identity while retaining a sense ofauthenticity. All of the subjects voluntarily took part in the study. Besides, afterproviding informed consent, the four subjects underwent the case study which wasaudio taped. They were also given some small gifts as reward. To assure that nolanguage barrier discourage students’ guessing efforts, most parts of the study wasconducted in the subjects’ native language, Chinese.

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Chapter Two Research Design......... 21

2.1 Research Questions........ 21

2.2 Subjects........ 21

2.3 Instruments......... 22

2.3.1 Inferencing Strategy Questionnaire .........22

2.3.2 Case Study .....23

2.3.3. Lexical Inferencing Strategy Training ....25

2.4 Data Collection and Analysis Procedures.... 25

Chapter Three Results and Discussion ........ 27

3.1 Inferencing Strategies Used and Their Frequency......... 27

3.2 The Relationship between Gender and Choice of Strategies..... 34

3.3 The Use of Lexical Inferencing Strategies & Reading Proficiency....... 37

Chapter Three Results and Discussion

3.1 Inferencing Strategies Used and Their Frequency

The questionnaire used in this thesis was designed on the basis of a 5-pointLikert scale ranging from 1 (“never or almost never true of me”) to 5 (“always oralmost always true of me”). A-E equals 1-5 respectively. In order to find out whichstrategies are the most and least frequently used, frequency of each strategy used bystudents is calculated with the help of SPSS. The frequency of each strategy iscalculated based on the total number of students which is 110 while the percent isbased on the total number of 100. In order to have a better look at the question, twokinds of frequency and percent are calculated respectively. Frequency 1 and percent 1measures number and percent of students who chose A and B for each strategy whilefrequency 2 and percent 2 measures those of students who chose C, D, and E.Descriptive statistics such as mean and SD are presented below as well. To put itsimple: the lower the frequency 1 and percent 1, the more frequently used; the higherhe frequency 2 and percent 2, the more frequently used; the higher the mean, themore frequently used.

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Conclusion

Chinese high school EFL learners also use a variety of knowledge sources ininferring meanings of target words, ranging from linguistic to non-linguistic.Linguistic clues are composed of both intra-lingual and inter-lingual sources.Intra-lingual sources include word morphology, word association, homonymy,syntagmatic relations, paradigmatic relations, punctuation, sentence meaning,grammar , discourse meaning and formal schemata. Inter-lingual sources are L1-based,consisting of L1 lexical knowledge and L1 word collocation. Non-linguistic sourcesmainly refer to learners’ world knowledge or knowledge of the topic. Some of thesources are used more frequently than others. Several major frequency patterns ofknowledge source use have been identified as follows:a. Linguistic sources > non-linguistic sourcesb. Intra-lingual sources > inter-lingual sourcesc. Top three: discourse-level meaning > formal schemata > sentence meaningd. Bottom three: homonymy < grammar < syntagmatic relations

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Reference (omitted)