The more engaged, the better? An exploration on Chinese EFL learners’ lexical inferencing procedure

Abstract

Lexical inferencing is referred to as guessing the meaning of an unknown word using available linguistic and other clues. It is a primary lexical processing strategy to tackle unknown words while reading. This study aims to explore the procedure of Chinese EFL learners’ lexical inferencing in reading. Two types of introspective methods have been used to collect data. Fifty-five Chinese EFL learners at four stages of English learning (tertiary final, tertiary middle, tertiary initial and senior secondary) participated in think-aloud and stimulated recall session of lexical inferencing. The results show that there are a variety of procedures in their lexical inferencing, and there are also discrepancies of lexical inferencing procedure complexity across different stages.