Chiappello, María Edith and Valsecchi, María Inés Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto
Abstract: Lexical inferencing, that is, making informed guesses about the meaning of unknown words on the basis of linguistic and non-linguistic clues, has been found to be of outmost importance to foreign language learners when they encounter new words in their reading. A case study was implemented with the aim of looking into the type and quality of a student's lexical inferencing strategies at College level. Results show that the participant made use of a variety of lexical inferencing strategies which led in the majority of the cases to successful guesses of the meanings of the unknown words.
Introduction
Reading is considered the most important skill to be mastered by a student entering a second or foreign language academic environment since it is the means by which s/he acquires academic knowledge. For those foreign students who only have a low proficiency level in the foreign language, reading is basic for their success in a program of study.
Research has shown that the largest obstacle for second language readers is vocabulary knowledge and the most common way of overcoming this obstacle is by using a bilingual dictionary. In order to maximize their reading comprehension, learners should be fostered to apply strategies for guessing or inferring word
identifying strategies are those that the learners used to identify the meaning of the new word in the text…(repeating the text, repeating the section that contained the text, conducting word analysis, or word-form analogy). Evaluating strategies are those that learners used to evaluate and check the accuracy of their initial inferences. A strategy was coded as monitoring when the learner showed an awareness of the nature of the problem by making an explicit judgment about the ease or difficulty of the word based on the available cues in the text. While both identifying and evaluating are cognitive strategies, monitoring is a metacognitive strategy (2006, p. 392).
Those strategies that did not fit the above taxonomy were categorized and labeled accordingly.
Results and Discussion
Out of the 10 words which were initially selected for this experience, only 7 were used for the study of the strategies used since the participant manifested knowing the meaning of 3 of them: drought, look after and to be keen. Of the 7 words left for the study, the strategies used to decode the meanings of 3 of them (widespread, influx and engulfed) fell under Nassaji's classification (2006).
Widespread was inferred by resorting to word analysis which corresponds to the Identifying category: The participant tried to figure out its meaning by analyzing it into its various components, roots and affixes.
widespread hunger…ahí la palabra widespread la divido en dos, wide es como ancho, spread es desparramado, disperse.
The meaning of the word influx was inferred by resorting to the sub-category word-form analogy, i.e. by its similarity with another word in the mother tongue.
This strategy also corresponds to the Identifying category.
to cope with an influx of thousands of refugees… sufre una sequía severa, y al mismo tiempo supongo por la relación con la palabra en castellano, un influjo de los refugiados de los países vecinos a Mozambique…
from the magazine UPDATE, vol 125, (as cited in Longhini and Martinez, 1997) with the following words selected: “pocket”, “widespread”, “drought”, “influx” and
“engulfed”. This text was supported by a world map showing with different colors the levels of hunger in the world: chronic hunger, at risk of famine and famine. A student attending the subject English Language I at our Teacher Training College volunteered to take part of this case study. She was 18 years old at the moment of the research work and her proficiency level in the English language was intermediate as determined by her grade at the entrance examination of the English Training College. The participant was trained in the use of the verbal report technique (think- aloud). In think-alouds or concurrent verbalizations, subjects are asked to verbalize directly only the thoughts entering their attention and while they are still available in short-term memory when performing a task. First, one of the researchers provided two models of verbalization: 1) an instance of how to solve an anagram through verbalization of the mental processes involved, and 2) an instance of lexical inferencing of three supposedly unknown words within a paragraph. Then, the participant was presented with a short English text and was asked to practice verbalizing. The modeling took place in the mother tongue. Then, in order to gather data about the learner's lexical inferencing strategies, she was asked to read the texts chosen for this experience and try to infer the meanings of the underlined words in the text by verbalizing the content of her thoughts or the mental actions carried out in order to guess the meanings of those unknown words from context. This session was video recorded to obtain any non linguistic information which might be used as a source of further data. Data were collected in an individual session lasting approximately 40 minutes, both for the training and data collection sessions.
The data were transcribed, and then carefully examined for any observable inferencing strategies. Three researchers coded the data until a 90 % inter-rater agreement was reached. The data for this study were analyzed through open coding, i.e., a process of breaking down, examining, comparing, conceptualizing and categorizing data (Strauss and Corbin, 1990, as cited in Li & Munbi, 1996, p 203). Initially, labels emerged from the think-aloud sessions which were then grouped based on the taxonomy by Presley and Afferbach (1995, as cited in Nassaji, 2006). The three strategy types are: identifying, evaluating and monitoring strategies. Following Nassaji,
Engulfed was inferred by a strategy called Verifying which is one of the components of the Evaluating strategy category. The participant examined the appropriateness of the inferred meaning by checking it against the wider context:
está señalado como famine (mira el mapa) which is engulfed in a civil war, que está pasando por una guerra civil.
In this case, the wider context is given by the map that accompanied the text and to which she resorted and referred to in order to infer this meaning.
Furthermore, the linguistic context might have helped her in solving this word meaning, especially the collocation of engulfed with the phrase “civil war”.
The remaining 4 words were solved by resorting to other strategy types that emerged from the open coding and were categorized in the following way: In order to infer the meaning of pocket, in the phrase “a pocket of regional hunger”, the participant seems to have resorted to the use of non linguistic support, the colored map that accompanied the text, and also to the local context of the information provided in the same paragraph where the idea of “pockets of regional hunger” is immediately explained by the opposing idea of “not the widespread hunger”.
Have significant pockets of regional hunger…Bueno pocket yo pienso que no está marcado porque tienen, no están totalmente como todo el lugar que está sufriendo un hambre crónico o sea que yo lo interpreto como si fueran puntos, que hay regiones dentro de ese lugar … no todos, sino puntos.
The phrase “on the trot” was solved unsuccessfully since the participant verbalized the following:
So I had nine winters on the trot, me parece que esto es un viaje, o viajando, sigo leyendo pero por las dudas le hago un círculo con lápiz así me acuerdo que no lo sé…
In this case, the participant seems to have disregarded using the immediate context clue of “nine winters” (on the trot). Nevertheless, she made use of another strategy - that of making marks on the text, in this case of the phrase “on the trot”. However, this attempt was not successful to decode the meaning of the
phrase, probably because she did not return to this mark after having read the whole text.
The meaning of the phrase “plot of land” was inferred by the proximity of the word “land” which was a known lexical item to the student and by examining its relationship with another item in the sentence, - the word “buying”:
My parents came up with the idea of buying a plot of land… me suena como que land es tierra y plot parcela….
Interesting is the attempt our learner made to try to decipher the meaning of the word “stake” which appeared in the title “With the trees, I planted my stake in New Zealand” and then was repeated in the second paragraph of the text “that we would always have a stake in New Zealand”.
Stake puede referirse como un lugar que ellos van a tener ahí, porque está relacionado con plot … (she re-reads, stops, thinks and re –reads the phrase). Finally she adds:
no sé, lo voy a buscar en el diccionario. (She laughs, and looks at the researcher looking for approval).
Out of the 7 words whose meanings this learner was asked to infer, she was almost always successful (86%), except for the phrase “on the trot”. As far as the information provided by the video taping of the think-aloud session, our participant appeared to be relaxed, concentrated on the task, and did not provide any information related to gesture or body language, other than making marks on the text.
Lexical items Strategy type Sub- type Guessing
widespread
engulfed pocket on the trot plot of land
stake
Making marks on the text Resorting to the local context Collocation
Resorting to the local context Re-reading a portion of the text
Unsuccessful
influx Identifying
Evaluating Resorting to non-linguistic clues
Word form analogy Verifying
Successful Successful Successful
Successful Successful Nassaji’s
taxonomy
Emerging from open coding
Identifying Word analysis Successful
Table 1: Words selected to infer meanings, type of strategy, and successful guessing
Pedagogical implications
An implication emerging from this experience is related to the systematic training in lexical inferencing in the language classroom. This should be carried out by the teacher's modeling of her own mental processes when encountering an unknown word, followed by instances of students' practice. In this way, students will be able to enrich their repertoire of lexical inferencing strategies. Teachers should also alert their students of the problem of verifying their guesses through context, and encourage them to double-check word interpretations even when they think they know the word. Moreover, students should be shown how to use not only local context clues but also larger discourse-level clues to infer meanings
Since these metacognitive skills are an important part of reading itself, helping students to develop such skills would benefit them not only in vocabulary building but in reading as well (Huckin and Bloch, 1993).
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