Language teachers often encourage L2 readers to guess the meaning of unknown words in texts. This paper argues that before any statements about the value of guessing can be made, it is necessary to show how reliable learners' guesses are. To this end, the present study investigates how accurately EFL learners assess their understanding of unknown…

The purpose of the current study was (a) to assess the effectiveness of the lexical-set (LS) and the semantically-unrelated (SU) vocabulary instruction, separately and relative to each other, and (b) to assess the differential effects of the two methods for students of lower and upper English proficiency levels. Two intact EFL classes were…