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645TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 37, No. 4, Winter 2003

L2 Vocabulary Learning From Context:Strategies, Knowledge Sources, and

Their Relationship With Success inL2 Lexical Inferencing

HOSSEIN NASSAJIUniversity of Victoria

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

This study examines the use of strategies and knowledge sources in L2lexical inferencing and their relationship with inferential success. Dataconsist of introspective and retrospective think-aloud protocols of 21intermediate ESL learners who attempted to infer new word meaningsfrom context. Analysis reveals that (a) overall, the rate of success waslow even when learners used the strategies and knowledge sources they

had at their disposal, (b) different strategies contributed differentiallyto inferencing success, and (c) success was related more to the qualityrather than the quantity of the strategies used. Findings challenge aunidimensional conception of the role of strategies in L2 lexicalinferencing and instead support an inferencing model that distin-guishes between strategies and the ability to use them appropriately andeffectively in conjunction with various sources of knowledge in lexicalinferencing. This article discusses the pedagogical as well as theoreticalimplications of the ndings for an integrated model of lexical

inferencing.

Many ESOL teachers assume that an important process in learningnew vocabulary is the inference learners make about word mean-ing when they encounter an unknown word in a text. Indeed, compel-ling evidence suggests that L1 learners acquire much of their vocabularyfrom inferring from context on the basis of multiple clues that might be

available to them. L2 learners lexical inferencing and its link with vocabulary acquisition is not as well understood and therefore hasrecently become the focus of much research (de Bot, Paribakht, &

Wesche, 1997; Dubin & Olshtain, 1993; Fraser, 1999; Haynes, 1993; Joe,1995; Lewis, 1993; Morrison, 1996; Nation, 1990; Paribakht & Wesche,1999; Parry, 1993; Prince, 1996). In L2 learning, much of this research


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has failed to provide strong evidence; therefore, L2 professionals needmore information about this potentially important process if they are tomake good decisions about vocabulary teaching. This study examines thesuccess of intermediate ESL learners inferencing when they come acrossunknown words in a written text. Through the use of think-aloud

protocols, I obtained evidence about the strategies and knowledgesources learners rely on during the inferencing process. Knowledgeabout these mechanisms helps in developing a theory of L2 vocabularylearning from context as well as an effective and efcient approach toteaching and learning vocabulary in L2 classrooms.

L2 LEARNERS LEXICAL INFERENCING

Although evidence from L1 research suggests that L1 learners learnmuch of their vocabulary from context, the results of L2 research in thisarea are inconclusive. There is uncertainty among L2 researchersregarding the role of lexical inferencing as an efcient L2 vocabularylearning strategy (Bensoussan & Laufer, 1984; Carter & McCarthy, 1988;Haynes, 1993; Hulstijn, 1992; Scherfer, 1993). However, many research-ers would agree that, if successful, inferencing can aid comprehension

and contribute to, if not lead to, immediate learning and retention oflexical and semantic information about words (Ellis, 1997; Hulstijn,1992; Paribakht & Wesche, 1999). Yet little is known about the exactmechanisms underlying successful inferencing and, in particular, howdifferent strategies and knowledge sources used to infer word meaningsfrom context relate to ultimate success in lexical inferencing.

Inferencing Strategies in Reading

L2 reading comprehension processes are heavily inuenced by theefciency of the lower level textual process (Nassaji, 2002, 2003).Evidence from studies on L2 reading comprehension suggests thatencountering many unknown words in a text may negatively inuencethe reading comprehension of L2 readers. Unknown words may alsopartly account for the observation that L2 readers read texts word by

word (e.g., Bernhardt, 1991; Bernhardt & Kamil, 1995; Carrell, 1988;Clarke, 1980). Skilled L2 readers, on the other hand, due to their skills inlower level word identication processes and higher level syntactic andsemantic processes, can read and understand the text more efcientlythan unskilled L2 readers (Nassaji, 2003). In addition, research investi-gating more specic causes suggests that L2 readers are also weaker inusing effective strategies in reading and dealing with new words than are


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L2 VOCABULARY LEARNING FROM CONTEXT 647

L1 readers (e.g., Auerbach & Paxton, 1997; Block, 1992; Carrell, 1988;Devine, 1993; Hudson, 1982; Kern, 1989). Thus, the type of strategies L2learners use may be related to their ability to comprehend and infer

words successfully from context.Research suggests that readers use a variety of strategies when they

encounter new words. These strategies include ignoring unknown words,consulting a dictionary for their meaning, writing them down for furtherconsultation with a teacher, or attempting to infer their meaning fromcontext (Fraser, 1999; Harley & Hart, 2000; Sanaoui, 1995). Among

various word-learning strategies, lexical inferencing has been found tobe the strategy most widely used by L2 learners, a process that involvesmaking informed guesses as to the meaning of an utterance in light of allavailable linguistic cues in combination with the learners general

knowledge of the world, her awareness of context and her relevantlinguistic knowledge (Haastrup, 1991, p. 40).

Fraser (1999) and Paribakht and Wesche (1999) found that lexicalinferencing was the most frequent and preferred strategy their adult L2learners used to learn the meanings of new words when reading. Fraserfound that lexical inferencing alone accounted for 58% of the cases

where learners encountered a new word. Other strategies were used at alower percentage: consulting a dictionary (39%), ignoring (32%), and

not paying attention to the word (3%). Paribakht and Wesche found thatalmost 80% of the strategies their university ESL students used in dealing with new words were lexical inferencing, with all other strategies ac-counting for about 20% of the learners strategy use. Inferencing has alsobeen reported to be the major processing strategy when learners attemptto derive and learn idiomatic and gurative meanings in reading.Cooper (1999) found that 28% of the time, readers used inferring fromcontext as a strategy to identify the meaning of idioms. This percentage

was higher than that of all other strategies, including analyzing the idiom(24%), using literal meaning (19%), requesting information (8%),paraphrasing and repeating (7%), using background knowledge (7%),and using L1 or other strategies (7%). In view of the dominance of thisstrategy in L2 reading, its value for lexical acquisition for ESOL shouldbe further investigated.

Successful Vocabulary InferencingStudies investigating what is involved in inferencing have identied

many factors that play an important role in successful inferencing. Thesefactors include the nature of the word and the text that contains the

word (Paribakht & Wesche, 1999; Parry, 1993), the kind of informationavailable in the text (Chern, 1993; Haastrup, 1991; Haynes, 1993), the


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importance of the word to the comprehension of the text (Brown, 1993),the degree of cognitive and mental effort involved in the task (de Botet al., 1997; Fraser, 1999; Joe, 1995), and the degree of textual informa-tion available in the surrounding context (Dubin & Olshtain, 1993).Successful inferencing has been shown to depend heavily on learners

prior knowledge as well as their ability to make effective use of extratextualcues (de Bot et al., 1997; Haastrup, 1991). It also has been shown todepend on learners having large vocabulary recognition knowledge, forexample, of around 5,000 word families (Coady, Magoto, Hubbard,Graney, & Mokhtari, 1993; Laufer, 1997), and their ability to compre-hend most of the words, at least 95%, in the text (Hirsh & Nation, 1992;Laufer, 1988, 1989; Liu & Nation, 1985).

Successful inferencing strategies range from those related to the

internal structure of the words and their components, including thevarious phonemic, phonetic, graphemic, and morphemic clues (Chern,1993; Haynes 1993), to the information about the syntactic and semanticrelationship among words, and even to the various higher order,extratextual, and discoursal clues (de Bot et al., 1997; Huckin & Bloch,1993). In a recent study, de Bot et al. (1997) found that L2 readers usedknowledge sources ranging from knowledge of grammar, morphology,phonology, and knowledge of the world, to knowledge of punctuation,

word association, and cognates.Based on the results of an exploratory study on inferring wordmeanings from context by three intermediate Chinese students, Huckinand Bloch (1993) proposed a cognitive processing model of L2 lexicalinferencing. The model incorporates two separate components: a gen-erator and evaluator component and a metalinguistic control compo-nent. The generator and evaluator component includes numerousinterconnected knowledge-based modules, such as a vocabulary knowl-

edge module, a text schema module, a syntax and morphology module,and a text representation module. The function of the generator andevaluator component is to generate and evaluate hypotheses about themeaning of the word encountered based on the various knowledgesources in the module. The metalinguistic control component includes asequence of serial and parallel decision-making steps that the learnergoes through when trying to generate and test hypotheses. Theseprocesses help the learner decide when and how to proceed and seek

help from context and various sources of knowledge available.Huckin and Bloch (1993) showed that learners appealed to variousknowledge sources and employed various cognitive strategies in theirattempts to infer word meanings from context. They also providedevidence for the degree to which these processes were used and how theyrelated to success. Paribakht and Wesche (1999) found that theiruniversity ESL readers also appealed to a variety of linguistic and


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nonlinguistic knowledge sources when attempting to derive the mean-ings of new words from context. They also found that the use of theseknowledge sources was affected by a number of other factors, such astype of text (summary vs. question), text characteristics (e.g., topic,content, genre), and word characteristics (e.g., verb, adjective, noun).

This approach to explaining inferences is consistent with that ofPressley, Borkowski, and Schneider (1987), who distinguish betweenlearners cognitive strategies and their knowledge base, but go a stepfurther to explain the relationship between strategy use and success.Pressley et al. conceived of ve factors that were considered important insuccessful strategy use: (a) having a wide repertoire of general as well asdomain-specic strategies; (b) having the ability to use strategies appro-priately and in appropriate contexts; (c) having an extensive task-

relevant knowledge base, ranging from general knowledge of the worldto knowledge about specic strategies and their causes of success andfailure; (d) being able to automatically execute and coordinate the useof strategies with various knowledge sources; and (e) having an aware-ness that, although success is related to efforts, efforts alone may not beenough. In this context, Pressley et al. (1987) made a distinctionbetween effort attribution and strategic effort attributions (p. 104),according to which, good strategy users realize that what matters is not

just efforts but efforts that are strategic and task matching.

Strategies, Knowledge, and Success

A fundamental question that has remained unanswered throughoutthis research concerns the relationship between the range of strategiesand knowledge sources learners use and their success in lexicalinferencing. Most of the studies conducted so far on the role of learners

strategies have been descriptive, so to what extent the strategies assistthem in deriving word meaning from context is not known. To addressthis question and better understand these processes and their contribu-tions to success in inferencing, the present study was designed todetermine (a) how successfully intermediate ESL learners infer wordmeanings from context in a reading text, (b) what strategies andknowledge sources they use to do so and to what extent, and (c) whetherthere is any relationship between the range of strategies and knowledge

sources they use and their lexical inferencing success.

METHOD

I chose introspective methods for the research because the object ofinvestigation was the set of strategies and knowledge deployed during


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reported as unknown by the total number of words in the passagemultiplied by 100.

The pilot study revealed that the students had a good comprehensionof the text. Their mean scores on a comprehension test consisting of 10questions was 7.6, and the number of unknown words for them,

including the 10 target words, ranged from 4.27% to 2.67% (which wasless than 5%). This percentage was later found to be very close to thepercentage obtained in the main phase of the study (4.01% to 1.06%).

Data Collection

Data were collected in individual sessions in which the researcher met

with each learner in a quiet room for about 4560 minutes. To guaranteethe equality of procedures, I conducted all the data collection sessions.Think-aloud techniques, which were used as the main data collectiontool, are procedures requiring participants to verbalize and report thecontent of their thoughts while doing a task. Despite some criticism ofthe think-aloud procedure, it is a common methodology used in strategyresearch (Ericsson & Simon, 1993; Pressley & Aferbach, 1995). More-over, such data, if not a true reection of, have at least been assumed to

be associated with the processes participants use in processing language(Olson, Duffy, & Mack, 1984). Introspective and immediate retrospectivereports were also used in this study. However, the data about the use ofstrategies and knowledge sources derive mainly from the introspectivereports because they involve more direct and online reporting of whatlearners are doing at the time of the task than do retrospective reports,

which ask learners to recall what they had done before (Olson, Duffy, &Mack, 1984). The retrospective reports were used mainly to nd out if

the learners had additional comments on their familiarity with the wordsor their inferencing processes.At the beginning of each session, I informed learners of the general

purpose of the study. They then participated in a training and practiceperiod in which I introduced them to the think-aloud procedure andexplained how they were to verbalize their thoughts. Participants also didrole plays using pictures as well as similar reading texts for trainingpurposes. After the training and practice period, when I felt that the

learners knew how to think aloud, I presented the reading passage andinstructed them to read it out loud. As they encountered each italicizedtarget word in the text, I asked them to try to infer its meaning from thecontext, verbalizing and reporting whatever came to their mind. I alsoasked them to underline and try to infer the meaning of any other words

whose meaning they did not know. I advised them that they could referback at any time to an unknown word to try to infer its meaning again.


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When they nished reading, I asked them to review the passage andmake any additional comments they wished about any new words andtheir thinking processes. For transcription purposes, I audiotaped thethink alouds and retrospective reports.

RESULTS

Results indicate that the intermediate-level ESL learners were not verysuccessful at inferring word meanings from context in a reading text.More specically, the results show what strategies and knowledge sourcesthese learners used during the process of inferencing in addition to therelationship between strategies, knowledge, and inferencing success.

Success of Lexical Inferencing

To determine the degree to which learners were successful atinferencing, I and an experienced native-English-speaking teacher inde-pendently rated their responses to each of the unknown words using a3-point scale (2 = successful, 1 = partially successful, 0 = unsuccessful).

Successful inferencing was dened as responses that were semantically,syntactically, and contextually appropriate. A successful response couldbe a word representing an accurate semantic meaning of the target word(e.g., a synonym) or an appropriate denition of the word. Because it

was possible to arrive at a completely accurate semantic meaning of aword and yet associate the word with a wrong syntactic category (Gass,1999), for rating purposes, we classied responses that were semanticallyappropriate but syntactically deviant, or vice versa, as partially successful.

In order not to underestimate learners success, if the meaning or thedenition they provided made sense in the context but when judged outof context was not the meaning of the word, we still considered theresponse partially successful. In cases where the response did not meetany of the above conditions, we considered it unsuccessful.

During initial rating, we obtained an interrater agreement of 94%. Wethen resolved disagreements through subsequent discussion to reach100% interrater agreement on all items.

The question about success was addressed by looking at individuallexical items. Because the 21 participants each responded to the 10target lexical items, the initial data set contained 210 responses ofinterest. However, the initial set of responses was reexamined in view ofsome participants indications during the reading and retrospectiveinterviews that they knew some of the target words. Omitting theresponses for individual participants on the specic words they indicated


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knowing reduced the number of target words to 199, for which responsescould be interpreted as inferencing of an unknown word.

Of the total 199 inferential responses, 51 (25.6%) were successful, 37(18.6%) were partially successful, and 111 (55.8%) were unsuccessful.The percentage of unsuccessful inferences indicates that more than half

of the time, students went completely wrong in their attempts to inferthe meanings of the new words from context. A chi-square test con-ducted on the raw frequency of the data revealed that the frequency ofthe unsuccessful versus the successful and partially successful inferences

was signicantly greater than the expected distribution would be ( 2 =46.59, df= 2,p .0001).

An item-by-item analysis of the individual words indicated that thedegree of successful inferencing for each of the individual words was

quite low, ranging from 9.5% to 38.1%, with the mean percentage for allthe items being 25.6% (see Table 1). Results also showed that where atleast 95% of the words in the text were familiar, there was still asignicant correlation between the learners inferential success (ob-tained by adding up the success scores the learner gained for eachunknown word in the 3-point scale system) and the percentage of theremaining unknown words in the surrounding context (obtained bycalculating the number of unknown words for each individual learner

and dividing them by the total number of words multiplied by 100) (r=2.46,p= .03). The correlation coefcient is negative because success wascorrelated with the density of unknown words, thus indicating that thehigher the proportion of unknown words in the surrounding context,the lower the likelihood of success. This nding highlights the impor-tance of lexical density, or the ratio of known to unknown words in thecontext of an unfamiliar word, and suggests that with a large proportionof words already familiar in the text (at least 95%), ne-tuned knowledge

of the remaining words in the context is still a crucial factor in thesuccessful inferencing of unknown words.Learners success seemed also to be related to the physical form of the

words and how they looked. Among the items guessed, the most difcultone waspermeated, followed bysqualor, afuence, and waver. The percent-age of successful inferencing for these items ranged from 9.5% to 23.8%(the mean percentage of correct responses being 16.65%). On average,83.35% of the time these words were either unsuccessfully or partially

successfully inferred. The problem with these words may be related totheir misleading nature and confusion with similar-looking words. Ananalysis of the learners protocols showed that many of the learners whoguessed the meanings of these words wrongly interpreted them byconfusing them with other similar-looking but semantically unrelated

words. For example, many of these learners mistakenly relatedpermeated,to meat, waver to wave, and afuenceto inuence. Although some of these


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words may be etymologically and historically related, they are currentlyused in quite different semantic elds. The following excerpt from theprotocol of one of the students who was attempting to infer the meaningof the wordpermeated illustrates the typical problem with such words.

Permeated . . . meated . . . is a kind of meat . . . I think there are somethingrelated with meat and the body . . . permeated with such things as chemicaland radio active.

This nding suggests that the words appearance and their similarity withother unrelated words may be a major source of problems in inferring word meanings from context (see also Bensoussan & Laufer, 1984;Laufer & Sim, 1985). It may also suggest that precise inferencing of

words may be related to how accurately learners recognize and decodethe orthographic form of the word (Ryan, 1997).

Strategies and Knowledge SourcesFollowing Pressley, Borkowski, and Schneiders (1987) distinction

between learners cognitive strategies and knowledge base and Huckinand Blochs (1993) distinction between knowledge sources andmetalinguistic decision-making strategies in their model of inferring

word meanings from context, this study makes a distinction between the

TABLE 1

Successful, Partially Successful, and Unsuccessful Inferences for Unknown Words

Inferences

Partially

Successful successful Unsuccessful

Unknown words of responses n % n % n %

1. permeated 21 2 9.5 1 4.8 18 85.7

2. squalor 21 3 14.3 4 19.0 14 66.7

3. afuence 21 4 19.0 5 23.9 12 57.1

4. waver 21 5 23.8 9 42.9 7 33.3

5. contract 19 5 26.3 0 0.0 14 73.7

6. sewage 21 6 28.6 8 38.1 7 33.3

7. curative 19 6 31.6 4 21.1 9 47.4

8. assessing 15 5 33.3 0 0.0 10 66.7

9. hazard 20 5 35.0 7 25.0 8 40.0

10. unfathomable 21 8 38.1 1 4.8 12 57.1

Total nand mean % 51 25.6 37 18.6 111 55.8

Total number


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use of knowledge sources and strategies. I dened strategiesas consciouscognitive or metacognitive activities that the learner used to gain controlover or understand the problem without any explicit appeal to anyknowledge source as assistance. In contrast, I dened appeals to knowledgesources as instances when the learner made an explicit reference to a

particular source of knowledge, such as grammatical, morphological,discourse, world, or L1 knowledge.

To determine the different types of strategies and knowledge sourceslearners used, I had all the introspective think-aloud protocols initiallytranscribed verbatim before being carefully examined and coded twice,once by me and then by a colleague. For coding categories, I consultedthe literature on vocabulary learning and lexical inferencing strategies(e.g., de Bot et al., 1997; Haastrup, 1991; Huckin & Bloch, 1993; Parry,

1991, 1993; Schmitt, 1997). However, the coding scheme I used derivesmainly from the data and reects the thinking of the learners participat-ing in the study rather than from pre-existing categories imposed on thedata. Coding involved reading and rereading the protocols and identify-ing in an inductive manner the kind of inferencing strategies andknowledge sources used. I established the reliability of the coding bycalculating an intercoder agreement on a sample of 20% of the data,selected from every fth participant. The intercoder agreement for that

20% of the data was 89%. The second coder and I resolved discrepanciesthrough discussion to achieve 100% agreement. I then examined andcoded the remaining data.

I identied a total of 11 categories of strategy types and knowledgesources. Knowledge sources used included grammatical knowledge,morphological knowledge, knowledge of L1, world knowledge, anddiscourse knowledge. Strategy types included repeating, verifying, ana-lyzing, monitoring, self-inquiry, and analogy. Repeating was further

divided into, and coded as, word repeating when the learner repeatedthe word alone and as section repeating when the learner repeated abigger section in which the word had occurred, such as the clause or thesentence. Table 2 presents the categories of knowledge sources andstrategy types identied, along with denitions and examples from thetranscripts.

Of all the knowledge sources, students used world knowledge mostfrequently (46.2%), followed by morphological knowledge (26.9%).

They did not use grammatical knowledge very widely (11.5%), and theyused discourse knowledge (8.7%) and L1 knowledge (6.7%) leastfrequently (Table 3). The ndings also showed variation among studentsin terms of the types of knowledge sources they used. For example,

whereas 71% of the students used world knowledge, only 33% useddiscourse knowledge. Due to the number of participants in the study, Idid not further analyze individual variations and their consequences.


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TABLE 2

Denitions and Transcript Examples of Knowledge Sources and Strategies

Students Used to Make Lexical Inferences

Knowledge source Denition Example

Grammaticalknowledge

Morphologicalknowledge

World knowledge

L1 knowledge

Discourseknowledge

Using knowledge of grammaticalfunctions or syntactic categories,such as verbs, adjectives, or adverbs

Using knowledge of wordformation and word structure,including word derivations,inections, word stems, sufxes,and prexes

Using knowledge of the content orthe topic that goes beyond what isin the text

Attempting to gure out themeaning of the new word bytranslating or nding a similar

word in the L1

Using knowledge about therelation between or withinsentences and the devices thatmake connections between thedifferent parts of the text

curativeeffect of medicine. . . .According to it is adjective . . .mmm . . . it is something beforethe effect.

unfathomable. . . . I dont knowunfathomable . . . un . . . it isnegative of fathomable.

I think the sewage is likesomething that is produces, . . .because of some of some illnessthat these people have, they aretalking about some problems thatthe people have in Africa.

assessing. . . .I forgot the idea. . . Oh I got the meaning . . . I gotit in Chinese, like if I want to applyfor position of professionalengineer I should pass the theassessment of some organizationslike the professional engineeringorganization.

far from being mysterious andunfathomable. . . unfathomable islike mysterious something that isnot known for everybody. Becausethey are talking about the causes ofsome disease and they they are

saying they are mysterious.

Continued on page 657

This question can be addressed in future research using more in-depthcase studies of individual learners (see Huckin & Bloch, 1993; Parry,1991, 1993).

Of all the strategies, students used repeating (including word repeat-

ing and section repeating) most frequently, accounting for about twothirds (63.7%) of the strategies used. Of the two types of repeating,students used word repeating much more frequently than sectionrepeating (39.7% vs. 24%). Other strategies students used much lessfrequently were analogy (8.5%), verifying (7.9%), monitoring (7.2%),self-inquiry (7.2%), and analyzing (5.5%) (see Table 4). Moreover,

whereas all learners used repeating, only 66.6% used self-inquiry, 61.9%


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used verifying, 79.19% used analogy, 61.9% used analyzing, and 80.95%used monitoring, suggesting that not all the students used all thestrategies and that there was variation among students in terms of typesof strategies used.

Relationship of Strategies to Success

To determine the relationship between successful inferencing and thestrategies and knowledge sources used, I rst calculated the percentageof successful, partially successful, and unsuccessful inferences for each

TABLE 2 (Continued)

Denitions and Transcript Examples of Knowledge Sources and Strategies

Students Used to Make Lexical Inferences

Strategies Denition Example

Repeating any portion of the text,including the word, the phrase, orthe sentence in which the word hasoccurred

Examining the appropriateness ofthe inferred meaning by checkingit against the wider context

Asking oneself questions about thetext, words, or the meaning alreadyinferred

Attempting to gure out themeaning of the word by analyzingit into various parts or components

Showing a conscious awareness ofthe problem or the ease ordifculty of the task

Attempting to gure out themeaning of the word based on itssound orform similarity with other

words

our beliefs waver. . . waver . . .waver . . . . May be . . . waver issomething beliefs waver . . .

but when we ourselves become ill,our beliefs waver. . . our beliefschange . . . change . . . when webecome ill our beliefs change . . .

yeah.

hazards. . . should it be pollutionaccording to the sentence?pollutions? No no . . . it shouldnot be that . . . it may besomething different.

and smell ofsewagein theirnoses . . . sew, age . . . should be akind of smell. But sew issomething, may be it is a kind ofplant, wood.

contractsome of the serious andinfectious diseases . . . contract . . .I think contract is is make fromboss and the staff . . . contract . . .

yes . . . this is easy . . . this easy . . .maybe its difcult, I am not sure.

squalor. . . may be it is likesquare . . . square . . . It should besomething like that.

Repeating

Verifying

Self-inquiry

Analyzing

Monitoring

Analogy


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strategy type and knowledge source. I then calculated a mean of successfor each strategy type and knowledge source. To that end, I divided thesum of the scores obtained for success in inferencing the target words bythe total frequency of each strategy or each knowledge source used toinfer the meaning of those words.

Among the knowledge sources used (see Table 5), morphologicalknowledge had the highest mean of success (.93), followed by worldknowledge (.83). These knowledge sources were associated with moresuccessful inferences than other knowledge sources (morphological

knowledge: 35.7% successful; world knowledge: 29.2% successful). L1knowledge had the lowest mean of success (14.3%) and was leastassociated with successful inferences.Statistical comparison of the meansof the knowledge sources and a two-way chi-square test on the frequencyof these knowledge sources and the degree of their success revealed nostatistically signicant differences in the contribution of different knowl-edge sourcesanalysis of variance (ANOVA):F(4, 99) = .355,p= .84; 2 =2.53, df= 8,p= .96.This indicates that whereas some of the knowledge

TABLE 3

Students Use of Knowledge Sources

Knowledge source n %

World knowledge 48 46.2Morphological knowledge 28 26.9

Grammatical knowledge 12 11.5

Discourse knowledge 9 8.7

L1 knowledge 7 6.7

Total 104 100

TABLE 4

Students Use of Strategies

Strategies n %

Word repeating 187 39.7

Section repeating 113 24.0

Analogy 40 8.5Verifying 37 7.9

Monitoring 34 7.2

Self-inquiry 34 7.2

Analyzing 26 5.5

Total 471 100


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sources contributed more to successful inferencing than others, successdid not depend much on what kind of knowledge source was used.

Table 6 displays the means as well as the percentages of successfulinferences for the different types of strategies used. Among strategies,

verifying, self-inquiry, and section repeating were associated with highermeans of success than were other strategies. The means of success forthese strategies were 1.51, 1.15, and 1.05, respectively. Verifying and self-inquiry were associated with the highest means of success and thegreatest proportion of successful inferences as compared to otherstrategies (67.6% and 52.9%, respectively). Of the two subcategories of

TABLE 6

Types of Strategies and Inferential Success

Inferential success

PartiallySuccessful successful Unsuccessful Total

source success SD n % n % n % n %

Word repeating .66 .84 45 24.1 33 17.6 109 58.3 187 100

Sectionrepeating 1.05 .91 50 44.2 19 16.8 44 38.9 113 100

Verifying 1.51 .77 25 67.6 6 16.2 6 16.2 37 100Analogy .40 .71 5 12.5 6 15.0 29 72.5 40 100

Self-inquiry 1.15 .96 18 52.9 3 8.8 13 38.2 34 100

Analyzing .73 .92 8 30.8 3 11.5 15 57.7 26 100

Monitoring .94 .92 13 38.2 6 17.6 15 44.1 34 100

Total .86 .91 164 34.8 76 16.1 231 49.0 471 100

Knowledge Mof

TABLE 5

Knowledge Sources and Inferential Success

Inferential success

Partially

Successful successful Unsuccessful Total

source success SD n % n % n % n %

Grammatical .67 .89 3 25.0 2 16.7 7 58.3 12 100

Morphological .93 .90 10 35.7 19 21.4 12 42.9 28 100

L1 .57 .79 1 14.3 6 28.6 4 57.1 7 100

World .83 .86 14 29.2 6 25.0 22 45.8 48 100

Discourse .78 .83 2 22.2 3 33.3 2 44.4 9 100

Total .82 .86 30 28.8 25 24.0 49 47.1 104 100

Knowledge Mof


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repeating, section repeating in comparison to word repeating wasassociated with a higher mean of success (1.05 vs. .66) and a higherpercentage of successful inferencing (44.2% vs. 24.1%). Analogy wasassociated with the lowest mean of success (.40) and the least proportionof successful inferences (12.5%). An ANOVA conducted on the means of

success for strategies and a two-way chi-square test conducted on thestrategy types and their proportion of success revealed a statisticallysignicant difference in the contribution of the different strategies

ANOVA:F(6, 464) = 8.85,p .001; 2 = 51.10, df= 12,p .001. Thesendings indicate that success in inferencing depended signicantly on

what kind of strategy learners used.Further analysis of the data showed, however, that none of the

strategies and knowledge sources, even the most successful one, was

100% successful alone. In fact, none of the means of success reached 3(i.e., fully successful). I also found variations in strategy use both withinindividual participants and across items guessed. This suggests thatsuccessful inferencing may be the result not of using one strategy orknowledge source over and above other strategies but of the extent to

which various kinds of strategies and knowledge sources converge andlink. Due to the number of participants in the study, however, I did notanalyze such individual variations. This question can be addressed in

future research using more in-depth case studies of individual learners(see Huckin & Bloch, 1993; Parry, 1991).Another point concerns the relationship of success with the number

versus the kind of strategies used. Out of the total number of strategiesused (n = 471), about half (231) were associated with unsuccessfulinferencing. However, out of the total number of strategies associated

with unsuccessful inferencing (231), about half (109) were word repeat-ing, with fewer instances of the other more elaborative strategies. In the

case of successful inferences, on the other hand, relatively more in-stances of section repeating (50), verifying (25), and self-inquiry (18)can be seen. These ndings suggest that success in inferencing may notbe related as much to the quantity as to the quality of the strategies used(see also Vann & Abraham, 1990).

DISCUSSION

The results of this research offer some insight into the process ofinferencing vocabulary meaning during L2 reading and guidance forteaching vocabulary through reading.


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Explanation of L2 Inferencing

The ndings of this research can be explained through a combinationof the cognitive model of vocabulary learning from context developed byHuckin and Bloch (1993) and the model of good strategy users (GSU)

by Pressley et al. (1987). Huckin and Blochs model includes knowledgesources and strategies as the explanatory factors for vocabulary inferencingin general, whereas the GSU model attempts to explain the differentialeffects of strategy use.

Knowledge Sources

Among knowledge sources, students used general knowledge of theworld most frequently, indicating that they were very dependent on thiskind of knowledge when inferencing word meanings from context andthat this knowledge provided an important knowledge base for their

judgments. Students did not use grammatical knowledge very often,which may indicate that information about the grammatical function ofthe words was not something they needed to infer the meanings of thenew words from context. However, even when used, this knowledgesource was not associated with much success.

This nding is consistent with what Parry (1993) found about theusefulness of grammatical knowledge in a longitudinal study that investi-gated how a Japanese student extracted the meaning of unknown wordsfrom an academic text. Parry found a greater semantic than syntacticrelationship between the words and their inferred meanings. In herstudy, the learner almost always had been able to infer the syntacticinformation about the unfamiliar words even in cases where the inferredmeaning was a wrong meaning. This, then, may suggest that knowing the

grammatical function of a word or that a word belongs to certainsyntactic categories such as verbs, adjectives, or adverbs may not lead toan accurate semantic representation of the word in context. Interpretedthat way, it may provide support for the idea that the process ofextracting an accurate conceptual meaning about an unknown wordfrom context is a lemma construction process (de Bot et al., 1997), in

which word meaning may not develop simply from resort to the syntacticinformation about the word, something which can be done very easily by

most skilled learners. Rather, it may develop from a nal semanticspecication, which should be accessed and matched with the concep-tual information existing in the learners conceptual system.


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Strategies

The strategies learners used included repeating, verifying, monitor-ing, self-inquiry, analyzing, and analogy. Within Huckin and Blochs(1993) model, the role of these strategies can be seen as examples of

cognitive decision-making processes learners use while interacting withthe text and formulating and testing their word meaning hypotheses.Results showed that learners used repeating as the major strategy. Thefact that they used this strategy very often is not surprising becauserepeating can aid both comprehension of and reection on the content.However, of the two types of repeating, section repeating led to signi-cantly higher means of success and was more associated with successfulinferencing than word repeating. The advantage of section repeating

may in part relate to the role of this strategy in assisting the learner torelate the word to the phrase or sentence in which it has occurred and touse the potential cues available in those contexts. Thus, it seems tosupport the idea that success in inferencing is more related to the degreeto which the learners strategy in processing the word is global than local(Dubin & Olshtain, 1993; Haynes, 1993; Huckin & Coady, 1999; Nation,1990).

Among strategies, however, verifying and self-inquiry were related

more to successful inferencing than other strategies. This nding seemsto provide evidence for the important role of these metacognitivestrategies in lexical inferencing. The advantage of these strategies may inpart relate to the role of these processes in assisting learners to examinethe accuracy of their guesses and revise or reevaluate them against theinformation provided in the wider context. Self-inquiry, in particular,may help learners to concentrate on their inferences by actively ques-tioning them and then looking for alternative solutions in cases where

they nd them to be wrong. Several research studies in L1 have shownthe potential benets of using self-inquiry in reading and understandingwhole texts (Andre & Anderson, 1978; Frase & Schwartz, 1975; Singer &Donlan, 1982). These studies suggest that self-inquiry may lead to moreactive processing of materials being read and the activation of relevantbackground knowledge (Wong, 1985). It is possible that the use of thisstrategy in lexical inferencing may do the same. It may also makestudents more conscious of the problem and then better enable them to

research solutions. Analysis showed, however, that although some of the strategies weremore related to successful inferencing than others, the overall contribu-tion of these strategies was partial and limited. This suggests that successin inferencing may not depend just on the use of certain strategies butalso on how effectively the use of strategies is combined and coordinated


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with the use of other sources of information in and outside the text. Inthe present study, for example, students used word repeating andanalogy very often, but these efforts were not associated with muchsuccess. Within Pressley et al.s (1987) framework, these strategies couldbe taken as examples of nonstrategic attempts.

Other examples of nonstrategic attempts were evident in the heavyreliance on word repeating that may reect a narrow word-basedapproach to lexical inferencing used by these intermediate-level ESLstudents, which may have contributed to the overall low rate of success as

well (see Qian, 1998, for similar results). Indeed, repeating the worditself can be a helpful strategy, particularly, when it can help the studentaccess the meaning of a word through eliciting a phonological ororthographic representation of the word in the lexicon (Ellis & Beaton,

1993). However, this strategy turned out to be ineffective in this study,partly because most of the target words in the text were low-frequency

words and words that were completely unknown to the students. Whenthe word is completely unknown, students are unable to get much out ofrepeating the word itself simply because there is little conceptualreference for the word in their lexicon.

Analogy can also be a helpful strategy and can sometimes be used as ameans of retrieving the meaning of a word through associating it with

other neighboring words. However, it may fail if there are pseudo-similarwords in the text and if students fail to distinguish the word from thosethat are deceptively similar (Bensoussan & Laufer, 1984; Haynes, 1984,Huckin & Bloch, 1993). In such cases, analogy may lead to what Huckinand Bloch (1993) called a mistaken ID (p. 166), a process whereby thestudent takes a word for another similar-looking word.

Pedagogical Implications

This study demonstrated that the ESL students experienced difcultyin successfully inferring the meanings of unknown words from context,even though they reported knowing most of the words in the text andused the strategies and knowledge sources they had at their disposal.This nding adds to and conrms the literature in both L1 and L2learning that inferring new word meanings from context is not an easy

task (e.g., Bensoussan & Laufer, 1984; Kelly, 1990; Prince, 1996; Schatz &Baldwin, 1986; Shu, Anderson, & Zhang, 1995). The low mean percent-age of correct inferences found in this study (25.6%) seems to replicatethe ndings of Bensoussan and Laufers (1984) study, in which contexthelped L2 learners with guessing only 24% of the words with no positiveeffect on the remaining 76% of the words. These ndings call into


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664 TESOL QUARTERLY

question the efcacy of contextual inferencing in L2 vocabulary acquisi-tion and consequently lend support to theories that posit a central rolefor instructed L2 vocabulary learning.

This nding suggests that in ESL learning classrooms, students shouldnot 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,dening, and explaining the new words to the students. I do not mean,however, to downplay the role of context in L2 vocabulary learning. Twodistinctions are important here: rst, between using context for learningthe meaning of words based on a single exposure and using context as ameans of providing multiple exposures to the same word, and second,between using context as a means of generating new knowledge and as ameans of consolidating known knowledge. Although the results of this

study may call into question the efcacy of context in the former sense(i.e., generating new knowledge and learning words based on a singleexposure), there seems to be little question about the importance ofcontext in providing frequent exposure and a framework for consolidat-ing and reinforcing vocabulary knowledge. This suggests that even ifexplicit instruction of vocabulary is essential, it should always be consid-ered a starting point (Schmitt & McCarthy, 1997). Once this initial stageis undertaken, students must encounter the word in diverse contexts if

they are to build the various kinds of links and knowledge componentsrequired for developing the full meaning of a word.As for strategies, the study showed that successful strategies were those

that were evaluative and context-based rather than local and word-basedand that successful inferences were made by students who monitored,considered, and judged the usefulness of the information present in the

wider context. These ndings seem to suggest a need for traininglearners and helping them use such strategies when attempting to derive

word meanings from context. Teachers should help students develop acritical awareness of the problems of local and word-based strategies bymaking them aware of the fact that these strategies alone may not be veryreliable sources of information for inferring word meaning from con-text. Students should be encouraged to adopt a more context-basedapproach by going beyond the word and paying attention to the phrase,clause, sentence, and even the paragraph in which the word is located.Teachers should also encourage students to always make sure that their

inferences are correct by checking and verifying them against theexisting clues in the wider context. Among the different activities teachers might use to promote these

skills in language classrooms is the use of segmented texts. Teacherscould present students with short, segmented texts. The students couldinfer the meanings of certain target words in each segment as they seeeach new segment of the text. As they read each segment, they could


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evaluate the information presented in the upcoming segment and theirrelationship with their inferences and then verbalize their evidence fortheir responses. As Porte (1988) suggested, students could initially bepresented with a sentence or segment of a text, including a target word.

When nished with the rst segment, they could receive a series of

written prompts or questions that they should answer in a step-by-stepmanner. Questions could include those about the kind of informationand clues in the rst segment, whether they used them, and also the kindof information or clues they expect to nd in the next segment. They

would also be asked to write down their initial guesses based on theevidence they have collected so far. They would then be presented withthe next segment of the text, followed by a series of other questionsasking them whether they want to change or to stay with their initial

responses in light of the new information, and if so why. This cycle wouldthen continue for each target word in each segment of the text.

The assumption here is that by virtue of these explicit efforts, learnersmay become more conscious of the role of contextual clues andstrategies and, hence, more active in gaining control over their searchfor relevant information and knowledge sources in the wider section ofthe text. However, the value and effectiveness of these activities shouldbe explored in empirical research. In addition, instruction focusing on

using strategies without taking into account the range of other mediating variables may not be very effective. In the past, researchers haveconducted many studies of the effectiveness of training learners to usecomprehension and inferencing strategies. Although some have found apositive effect for strategy training on reading comprehension andinferencing ability (e.g., Carrell, Pharis, & Liberto, 1989; Fraser, 1999,Kern, 1989), others have failed to produce such strong effects (e.g.,Barnett, 1988). Thus, learners should be trained to use effective strate-

gies but should realize that inferencing is complex and that its successinvolves not only the use of appropriate strategies but also the combina-tion and coordination of those strategies with many other skills andknowledge sources both inside and outside the text. Lexical inferencingalso depends heavily on students language and comprehension skills,the types of tasks and texts, and the nature of the word as well as a hostof other individual and learner-related variables and differences.

CONCLUSION

Investigating the cognitive structures and processes of ESL students isa revealing enterprise, offering important insights to ESOL teachers. Atthe same time, results should be interpreted in view of the tentativenature of the data examined in the research. First, the very act of asking


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666 TESOL QUARTERLY

students to report the use of strategies may have pushed them to use orto report to have used strategies they may not have actually used.Students were also asked to report their thinking in their L2, English.This decision was made because the participants were of various L1backgrounds and it was hard to collect, translate, and compare data in

different languages. However, the decision to require the use of onelanguage or another adds a particular set of challenges for the learners.In using the L2, learners may not be able to fully articulate and reporttheir thought processes. Second, in attempting to gain depth into theinferencing processes, I chose a relatively short passage. This decision

was made due to the qualitative nature of the research methodology andthe amount of time involved in collecting, transcribing, and analyzingthink-aloud data. Future research might include more extended, and if

possible, diverse types of reading passages. The use of different types ofreading passages, in particular, would allow the researcher not only toexplore the various strategies learners use but also to compare the useand effectiveness of those strategies across different types of text.

With respect to the results about success, the relationship shown inthis study between some of the strategies and the students successshould not be taken as cause and effect relationships. As discussedearlier, inferencing is a process consisting of multiple components and

involving a complex interaction and coordination of a number of skills,strategies, and knowledge sources. Studies have also shown a relationshipbetween students use of inferencing strategies and their general learn-ing styles (Parry, 1993, 1997; see also Ehrman & Oxford, 1990), whichsuggests that studies are also needed to examine how success in lexicalinferencing interacts with and is mediated by other learner-related

variables, such as learners general cognitive and learning style prefer-ences. The research reported here should prove useful in conceptualiz-

ing and conducting such future research on L2 inferencing.

THE AUTHOR

Hossein Nassaji is assistant professor of applied linguistics in the Department ofLinguistics at the University of Victoria. His research interests include L2 readingcomprehension and vocabulary acquisition, focus on form instruction and negoti-ated feedback, L2 classroom discourse, and the application of sociocultural ap-proaches to second language acquisition.

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APPENDIX

Health in the Rich World and in the PoorAn American journalist, Dorothy Thompson, criticises the rich worlds health programmes inthe poor world. She describes her trip to Africa where she got food poisoning and her friendmalaria:

The town is very dirty. All the people are hot, have dust between their toes and the smellofsewagein their noses. We both fell ill, and at ten oclock in the morning I got frightenedand took my friend to the only private hospital in town, where you have to pay. After beingtreated by a doctor, we caught the next aeroplane home.

Now, I believe that the money of the World Health Organisation (WHO) should be spent

on bringing health to all people of the world and not on expensive doctors and hospitals forthe few who can pay. But when we ourselves become ill, our beliefs waver. After we cameback to the States we thought a lot about our reaction to this sudden meeting with healthcare in a poor country. When assessingmodern medicine, we often forget that without moremoney for food and clean water to drink, it is impossible to ght the diseases that are causedby infections.

Doctors seem to overlook this fact. They ought to spend much time thinking about whythey themselves do notcontractsome of the serious and infectious diseases that so many oftheir patients die from. They do not realize that an illness must nd a body that is weakeither because of stress or hunger. People are killed by the conditions they live under, thelack of food and money and the squalor. Doctors should analyze why people become ill

rather than take such a keen interest in the curativeeffect of medicine.In the rich world many diseases are caused byafuence. The causes of heart diseases, for

instance, are far from being mysterious and unfathomablethey are as well known as thecauses of tuberculosis. Other diseases are due to hazardsin the natural conditions in which

we live. Imagine the typical American worker on his death-bed: every cellpermeatedwith suchthings as chemicals and radio-active materials. Such symptoms are true signs of an unhealthy

world.

From Haastrup, 1991, p. 234. Used with permission.
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11nassaji 2003 l2 vocabulary

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