Lexical Inferencing Strategies for Dealing with Unknown Words in Reading—A Contrastive Study between Filipino Graduate Students and Chinese Graduate Students

Abstract

This study examined the lexical strategies used by EFL learners and ESL learners when they encountered unknown words while reading. It aimed to explore the following research questions: 1. Do Chinese the graduate students and the Filipino graduate students employ lexical inferencing to deal with unknown words in reading? 2. What lexical inferring strategies do the Chinese graduate students and the Filipino graduate students use to deal with unknown words in reading? 3. Is there any difference in the employment of inferring strategies between the Chinese graduate students and the Filipino graduate students? If yes, what is the difference? 4. Do lexical inferring strategies lead to incidental vocabulary learning? The results of this study provided positive answers to all the questions except for no further evidence for gaining new vocabulary incidentally by lexical inferencing strategies. This research produces a new insight into the impact of lexical inferencing strategies on vocabulary learning and offers some suggestions to pedagogic vocabulary practice.