Hossein Nassaji: L2 Vocabulary Learning From Context: Strategies, Knowledge Sources, and Their Relationship With Success in L2 Lexical Inferencing

Introduction Studies have found that inferencing a favoured strategy among adult learners for finding out meanings of new words in a text. Various factors: the nature of the word and text surrounding; degree of cognitive effort needed; amount of information available in the surrounding text; Successful inferencing depends heavily on prior knowledge of topic, and ability to use extra- textual information; ability to comprehend most of the words.

Questions: (a) how successfully intermediate ESL learners infer word meanings from context in a reading text, (b) what strategies and knowledge sources they use to do so and to what extent, and (c) whether there is any relationship between the range of strategies and knowledge sources they use and their lexical inferencing success

Results Text at least 95% of which was understood. Used 'think-aloud' procedures. Of the total 199 inferential responses, 51 (25.6%) were successful, 37 (18.6%) were partially successful, and 111 (55.8%) were unsuccessful. More than half the time, went completely wrong.

Comments The fewer unknown words in the surrounding text – the greater the chances of success. wrong interpretations of morphology e.g. permeated,to meat, waver to wave, and affluence to influence.

Knowledge sources grammatical knowledge morphological knowledge knowledge of L1 world knowledge discourse knowledge. Most frequent: World knowledge (46.2%) morphological knowledge (26.9%) Not very frequent: grammatical knowledge (11.5%) discourse knowledge (8.7%) L1 knowledge (6.7%).

Strategies Repeating Verifying Analyzing Monitoring Self-inquiry, Analogy. Most frequent: repeating (including word repeating and section repeating) (63.7%) Less frequent analogy (8.5%) verifying (7.9%) monitoring (7.2%) self-inquiry (7.2%) analyzing (5.5%).

Which were associated with success? Section repeating highest, analogy least Association between use of strategies and success However, none of them on their own produced success: so you need a combination. Successful: repeating, self-inquiry, verifying. Grammatical knowledge not used very much, and when used was not associated with success

This finding suggests that in ESL learning classrooms, students should not be pushed to rely too much on context to learn the meanings of new words. Teachers should devote part of the class time to identifying, defining, and explaining the new words to the students. I do not mean, however, to downplay the role of context in L2 vocabulary learning. Two distinctions are important here: first, between using context for learning the meaning of words based on a single exposure and using context as a means of providing multiple exposures to the same word, and second, between using context as a means of generating new knowledge and as a means of consolidating known knowledge. (p.664)

Strategies help up to a certain point Grammatical identification – doesn’t help much. Word repeating, analogy, morphology etc. – not much. Best: repeating of whole phrases or sentences, verifying, self-inquiry.