In the English as a second language (ESL) research context, teachers are committed to ensuring that students are aware of their writing skills and the kinds of errors they make in their writing. This explains why teacher feedback is frequently practised in the writing classrooms. Self-assessment is another supplementary strategy that provides…

There are grounds for believing that prompting language learners to infer the meaning of new lexical items is beneficial because inferring the meaning of lexical items and verifying one's inferences invites more cognitive investment than simply being presented with the meanings. However, concerns have been raised over the risk that wrong…

This study examined whether the reading passages in the new series of English-language textbooks for high-school students in Vietnam fostered reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading by looking at four factors: the number of unfamiliar words in the texts, the importance of these words for text comprehension, the…

Research has suggested that the type and frequency of learning strategies employed by successful listeners is greater than their less successful counterparts. Based on evidence that metacognitive strategies (e.g. listening-for-gist; inferring meaning) are more effective than cognitive ones (e.g. word-for-word translation), this study sought to…

Growing concerns have been voiced about strategies employed in L2 reading in general and dealing with unknown words in particular. Among other strategies, lexical inferencing has received attention in the literature. However, more research is needed to further clarify how different levels of L2 reading proficiency may affect the readers'…

Second language researchers and trainers have met with some success in teaching language learners the skill of inferring meaning from context while reading, using a variety of teaching methods. This paper describes a study that attempts to compare the effectiveness of three teaching methods, on ESL learners' ability to infer from context and…